Comments on: Comparing Amazon EC2 with VPS and dedicated hosting

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:06:12 +0000

The advantages outweigh the disadvantages right now for most people, and the storage issues will be worked out. Why all the FUD?

Also, note that data is *not* lost on reboot. I reboot my instances all the time, and all the data added to the image since it was loaded is still there when it fires back up.

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:20:36 +0000

True, SmugMug does have some primary storage, but the CEO said that they are slowly moving things over to S3 so that they don’t have to buy any more storage hardware. I believe he said they were spending some 40k a month just in new hardware that they don’t have to do now.

As for my potential use, I’m not worried about the latency because it wouldn’t be while the user is waiting for a response. The use case isn’t upload an image, process and show me the results. It more of an archiving process where they would batch upload hundreds of files for storage.

By: Todd Huss

Todd Huss — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 03:59:34 +0000

Robert, I think S3 is great but even SmugMug is only using S3 to backup their users images. The primary copy that gets served up on their website is stored locally on their own machines.

I think your idea of using EC2 to process images is interesting but I would do some serious testing with regards to network latency if you have to transfer the image up to EC2 and then resize it, all while the end user is waiting…

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 23:44:56 +0000

I wrote a couple of similar posts (huge datacenter and a call to google) about these new Amazon services. I read quite a bit on their forums and the database area is one that I think will really keep them from being used widespread until they get a good solution in place. It doesn’t mean it isn’t totally viable, but definitely not for the beginner.

One company however is really singing the praise for Amazon’s S3 product, SmugMug. Their CEO has a blog and talks about how much they are saving in hardware costs using Amazon’s storage; several hundred thousand in under a year no less.

One idea that I’m working on will use a combination of a VPS solution and EC2. It would utilize EC2 servers for image processing thus saving the main server for the web application. In this scenario I don’t need it to be persistent, just up long enough to process the images, and since you can start and stop instances programmatically, it can scale as needed and I won’t have to have the servers running 24/7, which is great since they charge by the hour and not by month.

By: Todd Huss

Todd Huss — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:49:55 +0000

Ben, what do you mean “umm no”. What you describe is exactly the 2nd DR scenario I describe. Perhaps you didn’t read the entire post?

By: ben

ben — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 12:36:27 +0000

Umm no. Amazon makes you think about disaster recovery, its built in. Its been faster than our VPS/DS, cheaper and we built a system to do database replication + 1 minute logging backups to s3. At MOST we can lose a minutes data, not bad for a new 2.0 startup.