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There is, more so than Linode for example. EC2 isn't a hosting provider. The instances can just disappear and everything on that instance is gone. If you are g

by gexla 13y ago

There is, more so than Linode for example. EC2 isn't a hosting provider. The instances can just disappear and everything on that instance is gone. If you are going to host a site there and do it right, then you need to fire up multiple instances and wire them together. There are tools to help with this. For persistent data storage, there is EBS. There are also tools available to running your application across multiple servers. These tools also create more complexity and failure points. For example, I believe EBS has been the cause of sites going dark in past AWS outages. Then you have AWS challenges such as crap IO on the smaller instances and more cost / complexity for getting around that. Dealing with all this gets expensive for the "just starting out" stage. It's probably okay for the "middle" stage when you are getting a lot of growth and have the cash to spend. If you are just starting out, it's best to go with a more conventional provider. I'm not a guru with AWS or systems admin in general, but these are the sorts of issues I have run into in the past.

dirktheman 13y ago
Yes, but on the other hand: if you pay for your mistakes now, things aren't that bad because you haven't got many users yet. If you're in the need of scaling things up you still have to figure out how AWS works. Who would you rather offend by downtime: 10 users while you're starting out, or 10,000 paying users a little down the road? I highly recommend getting started with AWS now. They have a free tier (1 year) which you can use. Heck, you could play around with it, just using it for the company blog. AWS is great in terms of autoscaling. True, the I/O isn't great, at least for the free tier (all the more reason to start now, while server load isn't that big yet). I wrote a blog post on starting out with AWS last year, check it out if you like.

by gexla 13y ago

dirktheman 13y ago

Yes, but on the other hand: if you pay for your mistakes now, things aren't that bad because you haven't got many users yet. If you're in the need of scaling things up you still have to figure out how AWS works. Who would you rather offend by downtime: 10 users while you're starting out, or 10,000 paying users a little down the road? I highly recommend getting started with AWS now. They have a free tier (1 year) which you can use. Heck, you could play around with it, just using it for the company blog. AWS is great in terms of autoscaling. True, the I/O isn't great, at least for the free tier (all the more reason to start now, while server load isn't that big yet). I wrote a blog post on starting out with AWS last year, check it out if you like.