
Amazon or self-hosted? - aespinoza
http://my-inner-voice.blogspot.com/2012/02/amazon-or-self-hosted.html
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PythonDeveloper
Both.

Amazon has a habit of going down when you least expect it, and while the
outages aren't _usually_ system wide, you want an off-site backup site that
can handle some percentage of the traffic, even if it's just a "we'll be right
back" page.

Additionally, if all your data is on Amazon and it has a catastrophic failure,
it's can be lost forever. Your databases should be hosted on your own network
as Amazon can't guarantee that nobody will have access to your network segment
but you.

If you take credit cards, be _especially_ careful as the service level you
choose may not be PCI compliant, which is required by most credit card
companies. Read this (may be out of date):
<https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=34960>

If you use their payment system, they do claim to be PCI compliant.

Regarding bandwidth, in your example, you show $8/mbit for bandwidth. I get
300mbps for $3/mbit from Cogent, and $6/mbit for a 100mbit commit.

Additionally, the example shows reserved instances at 51 and self-hosted
instances at 131. This implies that Amazon's reserved instances are somehow
magically more than twice as powerful as self-hosted servers.

EC2 Reserved instances are NOT an instance type, but rather a rate plan, and
Amazon's servers are notoriously slow (and shared), and in my experience
there's _no way_ an Amazon EC2 instance is going to outrun a standard dual or
quad-core XEON server in a self-hosted model.

