On 2007-06-06 21:20:45 +0200, Christopher Arndt wrote: > Yes, that's a reasonable scenario, but it would be stupid to have the > 24/365 host (i.e the web/application server and load_balancer) running > on Amazon EC2 when you can use a cheap virtual host for it.
Yeah, probably. At the scale that EC2 is going to save you lots of money on peak load handling, $70/month vs $10/month for a single server isn't that big a difference in the bottom line. Both are going to be much cheaper than running your own hardware. I also noticed that EC2 is pretty competitive when it comes to memory. An AMI running there has access to 1.75GB of RAM. $70/month at slicehost will only get you 1GB. So if you have a very memory intensive app (or make good use of memcached), it might still be a better deal to run it on EC2 than another VPS host. This is actually what I'm busy with at work at the moment. We're converting our servers to Xen, allocating virtual server instances, and looking at external VPS hosting like slicehost and EC2 to figure out the most cost effective and reliable way to do things for the particular set of applications and use cases that we have to deal with. It will probably be some blend of all three in the long run with most apps running somewhere like Slicehost, some stuff staying on our own hardware (since we essentially don't pay for bandwidth if it's inside the university network and we can fill our servers with cheap, bulk disk space), and EC2 for additional, on-demand processing power. All in all, it's a better place to be than a few years ago when the options were pretty much either buy and maintain all your own hardware, or go with managed, shared hosting where you're pretty much out of luck if you want to run something other than PHP+MySQL. -- anders pearson : http://www.columbia.edu/~anders/ C C N M T L : http://www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/ weblog : http://thraxil.org/
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