One more foot in the cloud
Posted on | February 25, 2009 |
Over the last few years i’ve had all my smaller company/personal sites such as this blog for example on a machine called Burken. It’s a physical unix server that i co-owned with some really good friends and we all used it for hosting. It has had an incredible uptime and has been there for all of us like a good friend.
Photo from Jeremiah
But it has not always been easy. Over the years it’s been rooted at least once and every time someone was reconfiguring something and had to restart Apache, they would hold their breath, at least i know i did. We dreaded the day when the disks would crash and we would have to actually travel to Stockholm, where it’s located, to replace whatever that was broken.
So over Christmas me and my good friend Eric decided to cut loose yet another piece of hardware from our lives and invest in the cloud. So about a month ago we moved all of our sites, blogs and whatever to Amazons EC2. We gathered some friends together and invested in a EC2 small instance running Fedora 8 with a 20GB EBS disk connected to it.
And i must say i sleep much better at night nowadays. The move was (thanks to eric) really easy and all of our Wordpress-blogs, legacy-php-sites and python-hacks are running smooth and we are actually hosting a part of my latest project Listen To Blogs there as well. A lot less worrying about failing hardware but still full control over a (virtual) machine is a great setup indeed.
So how much does it cost? Well, it is a bit more expensive than buying an ordinary VPS at your favorite host but it comes with a set of perks as well.
It scales if you want it to
If you should decide to host something that can get some traction it’s no problem. You can add more servers as you go and both bandwidth and storage can be increased.
You are in full control
Since you are given root access to the server you are in full control over who has access to what and how your server is setup.
When it crashes?
If you have done your homework you are safe. Snapshots to S3 can easily be done, if you have your configuration written down it’s easy to get back in the game and the instance itself, well, just restart it if it should go down!
So, all in all this seems like a good choice. I say seems cause it’s only been running for about a month now. I promise to follow up with experiences after the first year. But it feels good to read this in the cloud right? It sure feels good writing at least!
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