
Survive the digg effect with Amazon Web Services - danw
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/survive-the-digg-effect-with-amazon-web-services
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rzwitserloot
For some reason this article sounds fishy to me. I can't put my finger on it
exactly, though this paragraph caught my attention:

quoting from the article:

> Using AWS isn't for the faint of heart. You need to have a very good
> understanding of Unix, you need to be able to install a Java runtime
> environment on your local computer in order to use the Amazon command line
> tools and you need to do a good amount of reading in order to get things
> initially setup.

Reading this carefully, it just doesn't add up. Installing a JVM is a null
operation on os x and solaris, virtually painless on windows, a minor and
rapidly shrinking annoyance on linux, and for now indeed a pretty major step
on freeBSD. In other words, in the vast majority of circumstances, it's
simple. Hardly "not for the faint of heart". The other point, the ability to
manage unix, is something you pretty much need -anyway- if you're going to go
with the only reasonable alternative (host your own or use virtual dedicated
hosting). I guess you could theorize that managing a windows box is easier for
certain individuals, but unless you're using ASP on IIS, windows isn't really
easier to maintain. This sentence almost seems like its designed to convince
the casual reader using a rhetoric trick.

The other thing I don't really get about S3/EC2, though probably I just
misunderstand the amazon services, is this:

When your userbase is small, you don't need it - it's just needless
complication. If your userbase grows, in almost all cases, you'll want to be
able to tell a potential suitor that your website isn't intricately bound with
a service operated by the competition.

Did I miss something?

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msiegel
Good introduction.

I've been using S3 to host media files for the last several months, on a small
scale, and have found it to be reliable and surprisingly inexpensive.

The simple setup, and ability to forward subdomains to S3 buckets, is a great
combination.

