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by nckbz 5347 days ago
I agree. I wouldn't completely write off those smaller servers and I think it serves as a very good entry point for learning Linux and server administration. If you're just starting out with Node or Rails its great.

I would recommend someone a Low End Box over a free Amazon Micro Instance any day, just because the CPU they limit you at is just bad. You start Apache or Nginx on those things or do a big yum install/apt-get and the terminal slows to a crawl.

Running a Production server off any low end box is definitely risky depending on who you're hosting with, but that goes without saying. I'd second BuyVM and Xen, I had a VPS with nordic and my cluster just died one day and was unrecoverable. They gave me a free small instance for half a year, but I opted to just switch instead.

My other recommendation is definitely Rackspace. Their low end service is only around 10 dollars a month, their chat support service is pretty good, and its fast and easy to scale. Database transactions on the cloud are still shit however. :( Really want a dedicated server if you're a larger or badly optimized site.

1 comments

I agree with you, but would point out that CmdrTaco hosts his new site (that got front page on HN a few times) on a Micro on AWS.

He does a serious amount of caching (obviously) and offloaded all assets to S3, but it looks like it is still possible.

FWIW, I am still skeptical given the amount of complaints you see about the Micros on the EC2 forums regularly. He could have just gotten lucky I suppose (as far as his neighbors on the host).

Yeah, I'd believe it. In full disclosure I run my personal blog off an Amazon Micro instance. Its a Fedora instance running passenger, nginx, and rails. In production mode with assets cached it absolutely serves requests at a decent speed. Absolutely painful to run an integration test or development mode though. Probably just my fault for using Fedora and not the default "Amazon Linux". However, I setup a client with a small instance running RedHat and never experienced any latency.