Hi all,

I've been thinking for a while about moving my hosting from my now 4 year old refurbished HP server, co-located in a local data centre, to Amazon EC2, and wondered what your thoughts or experinces are on this subject. I'm looking to continue using Plesk and ASL, but just add that extra level of redundancy by hosting on AWS, rather than my current server that has already had 1 drive fail in 4 years, that cost me £200 plus a 30 minute drive just for a single 146GB SCSI drive.

I currently have no backup service running, other than RAID on the server itself, and a copy of every site on my workstation and backups on my home office server. I know that is bad pratice, but lets not go into that here.

I'm also thinking this move might lower my costs, as the server currently cost £94 per month (that's $147.45 USD) plus the monthly Plesk lease and yearly ASL renewal. So over that last 4 years it has cost £4,512 (or $7,077.65 USD) plus Plesk and ASL for a Dual Xeon 2.8GHz, 4GB, 32bit server with Plesk 8.6.

Also this is an opportunity for me to finally upgrade to the latest Plesk, assuming Plesk with run on an EC2 Linux or CentOS instance.

I really appreciate your input on this, as I've never used EC2 so it is all very new to me. Thanks.

We took one client from 400 servers on EC2, to 8 dedicated ones (nothing special either). It saved them about 20k a month.

EC2 in my experience is slow. Couldnt tell you why offhand, buts its slower than it seems like it should be.

Hummm, I'm going to have a play with it. The server is expensive, and in itself is a massive point of failure, especial seeing as it is 4 years old.

Adding off-site back up to my current monthly hosting charges would greatly increase the cost compared to revenue generated, and replacing the server with a refurb can start around £300-£500. Not to mention down time from a hardware failure, and the cost of replacing components, items I don't keep in stock due to their cost alone.

Besides that I need to upgrade my Plesk panel, and an upgrade on a production system is just a crazy idea. So at least this way I can setup and instance, move clients over and then upgrade the main production server, or even swap it out for a new machine depending on cost and availability.

It would be nice to get other peoples experience with EC2, especially from users who are still using it.

Umm...I think you'd be better off with a rented server - the company we use (UK) is highly recommended!

Backups to S3 from any server are very easy and fast using JungleDisk - but you'd need some sort of backup software to create an archive for JD to actually backup.

Faris.

Doubt I'll find a rented server of the same spec as mine for £94 per month. Tried once, that's why I ended up buying my own.

I justed quickly (well whilst learning what to do) launched a CentOS 6.3 64bit small instance with EBS to have a play, and it was mostly painless but a learning curve. Shut it down for now, as I need to be at a recording studio at 10am tomorrow.

another thing to watch out for is they customize the distro, so you can run into compatibility issues with other repos (including core ones).

Yeah, you' be looking at between £150 and £200 a month for renting a good dedicated server in a good data centre