YES: We're using EC2/S3 24/7 for our startup and extremely happy with it. Our cost right now is $70 per month, but this will go up as we get more users, which is fine as we are running a subscription model. The storage costs are so low, we are going to offer a huge amount of data storage for our users. There is no cost to move data between EC2 and S3. We now don't worry at all about our hardware, and focus totally on our product and business. We were originally hosting at our office, but the bandwidth alone would have cost more per month.
Do you have any issues with instances crashing or DNS problems? How long have you been using it? I'm considering going this way also but I'm not very strong with linux admin skillz.
We are now into our second month with the service still running the same lisp process (which we've updated countless times with the REPL). So far - 0 problems. We have in place contingencies for going down by having realtime backup of our data so that if an instance were to crash, we could boot up another within a few minutes with no data loss. In that case, we would email our customers with the direct ip address to login until the dns updates. But I'm guessing this will be a very rare event. So the worst case we are envisioning is about 5 minutes of downtime for our customer in a crash, unless all of Amazon goes down which I don't think has ever happened?
Given Amazon's extensive data center experience with their own products, I have a lot more trust that their service will stay up vs. a smaller hosting company. And the worst case with them is minutes vs. hours or days with smaller providers. (How many famous sites going down with smaller hosts have hit the news in the last 6 months...)
For Ubuntu, we're using:
Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy AMI built using code customized by
Eric Hammond <ehammond@thinksome.com>
For more information:
http://ec2gutsy.notlong.com
If you go for it, I recommend having someone who has a reasonable knowledge of linux avaialable for asking questions or helping you directly, at least to set it up. My linux experience was 0 when we started. Now I can get done what I need to do - but my cofounder is the expert here and guided me on the commands I needed to work with the system. We also set up ssh session that would directly get us in the cloud and then connect to the lisp instance in real time with the REPL through emacs, etc.
We basically had a local box in our office all set up first, and then when our internet connectivity in the office was insufficient, we put it on the cloud. But since it is easy to play around with EC2 and start and stop instances, its probably just as easy to experiment on the cloud as you get things set up.
Wow, thanks for the reply. That's enough encouragement for me to give it a shot. Also, good point about the reliability of Amazon vs. that of a no-name hosting service. Although EC2 is still in beta and not quite the same as Amazon in general, it still gives more credibility to their service.
I don't think so. We used: Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy AMI built using code customized by Eric Hammond <ehammond@thinksome.com> For more information: http://ec2gutsy.notlong.com
