Amazon EC2 hosting serviceVirtual server hosting
EC2 provides Linux-based virtual servers (for web hosting or anything else), but what makes EC2 different from most other hosting services is that you can change the number of running servers within minutes, either manually or automatically.
It's perfect for startups because they charge based on the amount of capacity consumed hourly, so you can increase and decrease your available resources as much as you like and never pay for unused capacity.
There are also pre-configured server images available (including mine: http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/ ) which reduce the amount of time you need to spend configuring servers from scratch.
There are many hosting services, but I recommend EC2 for anyone who's looking for more than just cheap shared hosting.
Seattle, United States, recommended 10 months ago, viewed 152 times
Comments
Tim S. said
so paul - i am interested in this, but can't really judge how much it's going to cost me. it's for a simple site running MySQL, Tomcat, Apache with very low traffic on the outset. What's the ballpark here? $100/month - $20 - $1000?
10 months ago
Paul D. said
The minimum cost is $0.10/hour, which is roughly $75/month. Bandwidth, and storage on S3 (which you'll want for backups) are extra but are pretty negligible costs for a small site.
If you don't think you'll grow beyond a single server there are cheaper alternatives though, and they might be more appropriate because the big advantage of EC2 is the scalability.
10 months ago
jason m. said
It seems expensive. I'm using slicehost which gives me a 256MB "slice" (virtual server) for $20/month. Loving it so far.
6 months ago
