museless aiming

Amazon EC2

In an effort to understand what all this cloud computing business was about, I set up an Amazon EC2 account today.

My initial impression is that it's incredibly easy to set up a server. I had a Debian Lenny server up and running within about 20 minutes of activating my account. I was initially unhappy that I had to install Java to use their scripts for management, but the scripts actually turned out to be reasonably fast and easy to use.

In the past I've used Hostnine for hosting various things including this website. I used to use them for e-mail, but have since stopped, because I wanted to see if I could get Exim running as a full e-mail server on my home computer. (Although Hostnine did have enough outages to be mildly annoying.)

It turned out to be incredibly easy to set up a fully functional email server on Debian, so I started using my home connection to host my e-mail. This largely worked fine, but did have a few problems. IP address wasn't really one of them thanks to DynDNS, but Virgin outages and blacklisting were. Home broadband connections get listed as spam by certain email providers. This was the main reason I decided to move again.

I eventually switched to a virtual private server at VPSVille, which I've been pretty happy with. I've been thinking lately about whether I might move onto the cloud, but at the moment it seems lke EC2 is still too expensive to justify any advantages it currently has.

: tech : : cloud :
Wed Oct 14 17:01:12 BST 2009