On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 12:14 AM, Willy Tarreau <[email protected]> wrote: > well, last year I helped some guys in charge of a world wide sports > event which was hosted there. The performance was terrible. Completely > unstable. [snip] > > In this experience, I think that for them, everything was virtual : > the machines, the network, the support, the availability, the visitors > and finally the profit.
Ouch. That's something of a horror story. Thanks for the summary. This, and several recent blog posts about EC2 performance issues, is making me want to reconsider EC2. The negatives have not been reflected in our own testing of EC2, but then so far we have only dealt with single, standalone instances which only depend on external traffic. There is a lot of evidence that EC2 suffers from internal network latency as well as being overcrowded, at least in the US. We will need to run some comprehensive performance tests with multiple instances. But it's hard to ignore the myriad of services that Amazon provides. S3, EBS, autoscaling, Elastic IPs, geographic CDN -- those are all things we want. A virtually infinite supply of storage space through EBS is a particularly attractive proposition, and one which I think very few dedicated hosting companies can provide. We don't want to pay through the nose for some kind of half-assed SAN setup. We might end up deciding to use a dedicated, non-virtual hosting provider. That assumes we can find one that lets us cheaply and quickly (eg., within a day or two) add or remove new machines. There are a bunch of providers like that in the US, but I don't know of any reputable ones in Europe. Do you know of any?
