

Ask YC: Who uses Amazon EC2 or S3 here? What are your experiences? - inovica

Hi. We're just getting a new startup off the ground and are looking at our options. Currently we are running 4 webservers, but are looking at Amazong EC2 and S3.  What are your experiences? Financially how does it compare? What other similar services are there?  Would be interested in finding out :)  Thanks
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Goladus
If you plan to use a small, fixed number of servers and run them 24/7, then
EC2 probably will not save you much. It may even be more expensive. The price
advantage works best for tasks that need flexibility. Sites that alternate
between high demand and low demand, periodic or one-off processing intensive
tasks where a 24/7 server is overkill-- that's where you really see the
benefits of EC2.

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davidw
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ec2&btnG=Google+Search)

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shayan
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56825>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73791>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80647>

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_s3_exceeds_9999_...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_s3_exceeds_9999_percent_uptime.php)

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sonink
It really depends on what you are planning to do. 1\. If you need a server for
a longer term - or need to make serve web pages on demand then ec2 doesnt seem
like a very good option - not that cheap, server might trip and you might
loose state, and respnose times are not that great. 2\. It is good for batch
processing tasks that you can pile on multiple machines and then let go of the
machines. You get work done faster (parallel) and is cheaper than any other
option out there.

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aaroneous
I don't really think that EC2 should be considered a direct replacement for
dedicated servers for your average web app, but if you have a need that can
leverage the on-demand nature of EC2, then it's a great solution.

We use S3 and love it.

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inovica
Thanks to everyone who's posted. I've been reading about some negatives - slow
response times. Has this been fixed or is it something that still happens
still now?

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kirubakaran
I wrote this app to test EC2's speed.

<http://www.instantwordsearch.com/>

It gets a lot of visitors thru StumbleUpon and has held up pretty good in
terms of speed - over a period of few months.

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DarrenStuart
I use s3 for backing up stuff and some graphic storage for a couple of my
websites and love it. I use SGBPfox for firefox.

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jpdefillippo
I use S3 to store all the high and low res images for JPGmag.com and they have
performed amazingly.

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rapind
I am. S3, SQS, and EC2. It's incredible from a cost perspective. I highly
recommend you look into it.

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inovica
Thanks. Going to play with it this weekend.

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socmoth
ec2 + s3 is awesome. saved my but a lot.

