

Alternative to Amazon EC2? - amrithk

So I have been reading a few tutorials on setting up EC2 and it seems like you need a fair amount of system admin experience (which I do not unfortunately have). Plus, it also seems you'lll need to actively manage your instances and consistenyly backup your database in case an instance crashes.<p>I have been exploring other 'cloud' hosting services and came across mosso (www.mosso.com). Does anyone have any experiences with them? It seems to be as easy as setting up your site on a shared hosting service. Anything I should look out for?
======
EastSmith
Linux newbie here. Used ec2 image for over six months now. The only problem I
had is that sometimes google did not answer my linux questions on first page,
and I had to tweak the search query a little.

Yes, starting is a little weird, but once you create your ami(the os)
everything works great. There are free public images ready for development and
I am using one of the Right Scale CentOS images.

Six months ago I did not know anything about PuTTY, WinSCP, Crons, nohups, mc,
installing software packages easily(which really surprised me). Thank you Yum.

Backing up your data is needed, but it is needed anywhere anyway. I've
restarted that instance once in six months and it was not needed at all. Just
had to test restart functionality :)

------
mdasen
Mosso is one of those used-car-dealership services. They insist that you're
getting something amazing, but they won't exactly tell you what you're
getting.

More importantly, their $100/mo plan includes 3,000,000 requests - that's not
a lot considering that every CSS file, image, page, javascript, etc. is all
another request. So, they're giving you a server that can handle 1.16 hits per
second - DreamHost could do that!

Let's say you have a nicely busy site with 20 hits per second - your next big
thing. That's 51m hits/mo. You'd be hit with over $48,000 in overage charges
for requests alone - nevermind bandwith overages. Even if your site is a small
next big thing and has 5 hits per second, you'd still be hit with nearly
$10,000 in overage charges.

Plus, do they really guarantee automatic scaling? No. They're not going to
auto-scale a twitter or reddit. You're buying the idea that you never have to
think about server administration and that it'll come cheap.

Amazon has a realistic offering. Mosso is a way for you to tell people that no
one has to worry about scaling until it hits the fan and you're finished.

If you disagree, maybe you could shed some light on Mosso. Do they
automatically set up mysql clusters - multi master and all - as you get too
large for one database server? What if I decide to write a page with a looped
query: do they just scale that? What if I'm joining 20M records against 10M
users (an expensive, On^2 operation)?

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

~~~
izak30
yeah, they just announced that the 3mil requests was over, and they are going
to something closer to MT and saying 'compute units' (I was at over 6.5mil
requests last month).

They don't do good clustering or good scaling, They are a good solution for
small-time resellers, and that's about it.

Small time resellers that would have small sites and need multiple platforms
(php 4,5 IIS 6,7, mysql/mssql).

even then, like I said, downtime is a serious issue.

------
cleve
We use flexiscale. It does have an api, its just web-based
(<https://api.flexiscale.com/current/doc/>). We have worked closely with their
engineers to create a simple desktop app for managing/viewing server status
(<http://cogniscale.cognifide.com/>). This work is on-going.

However, EC2 is a great platform. Flexiscale is an alternative but EC2 is much
further down the line. I'm watching this space.

------
izak30
Mosso is easy to manage. Sure. check out <http://status.mosso.com> to see
their downtime track record. It's bad. I'm currently leaving mosso for EC2.

IMO, you may be better off in the long run to figure it out on EC2 (possibly
with rightscale).

The other possibility is to do it in python and use google appjet (publically
available this week, just announced at IO)

------
food
I think Google is targeting people like you (who don't want to deal with sys
admin issues) with their Google App Engine offering.

------
sean415
Not sure if you're still looking, but if you are, you should definitely check
out GoGrid (<http://www.gogrid.com>). The interface is a lot easier than EC2's
and there's no need to constantly backup the data on your cloud server
instances as (unlike EC2) the storage is persistent.

I've been using the service for just under a year now and I completely swear
by it.

Mosso is very limited by comparison---but I guess in the end it depends on
what you're looking to do and how much flexibility you need.

------
cmer
EC2 is the best you can get at the moment in my opinion. I guess it's time to
learn some *nix! It's not that hard, really.

And for databases, the new persistent storage feature
([http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=21082&tstart=0))
is what you want/need. (still private alpha)

But unless you have a multi gigabyte database, a simple mysqldump and an
upload to s3 should do the trick.

------
mark_ellul
there is flexiscale (<http://www.flexiscale.com/>) we use them... they are
ok... you still need plenty of sys admin experience... but they have good
uptime... and you pay per use time and bandwidth...

they don't have an API yet to start and stop but they have a web interface...
the thing is that provisioning used to be manual I think its done from web
interface now!

------
blender
Check out RightScale: <http://www.rightscale.com>

Cheers

------
simoc
Try GoGrid (www.GoGrid.com) thats actaully the true alternative to Amazon EC2
(windows support as opposed to Amazon EC2 which doesn't support it. It is also
cheaper)

------
jy88
Check out Slicehost, it's mentioned on here a lot.

------
amankhatwani
See: MobileMe 20 GB storage. Easy to use. Price: $99/yr.

