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by sxcurry 4649 days ago
I'm running a small project on a fixed server 24/7 and AWS makes sense for me. Why? I'm a one man team supporting a research project. I have no ability to self host. I have no time to look around at a lot of options and trying to figure out all the details of every offering. I need a server that has good uptime and good performance. Most of all, telling my users that we're hosted on Amazon makes them feels secure - it isn't going anywhere. Believe me, for a certain class of users, this is important.
1 comments
macspoofing 4649 days ago
A dedicated host would most certainly be a better (and cheaper) option for you, but hey, if you don't have time to look around, I suppose it's a reasonable trade-off.

>I need a server that has good uptime and good performance.

Then a single EC2 instance is not a good option for you. Terrible up-time, and terrible performance.

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sxcurry 4649 days ago
Can you supply more details - maybe I am missing something. My EC2 instance has been up for 249 days now and my node.js webserver instance seems very responsive. I still think it's a reasonable trade-off in terms of cost. My time is expensive, and to be honest even a few hundred dollars a month extra in server cost is not important. This is a research project, not a commercial website, so my needs may be different than most.
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frakkingcylons 4649 days ago
I may not be hitting the points that macspoofing was trying to make, but at least in my experience, you can get much better value with a different host (like DigitalOcean or Linode) where the setup time is minimal and the performance benefits are substantial. However, if your priority isn't perfomance/dollar, then the trade-offs are subtle and insubstantial and EC2 is fine.
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nasalgoat 4649 days ago
We did a test of an EC2 data centre setup vs. our existing physical data centre setup and the largest issue - that is, if you ignore the 3x cost - is the network latency and general quality of the local network in the availability zones.

No amount of optimization could eliminate the 100-150ms penalty imposed by the EC2 network vs. our dedicated hardware. The local network was congested and "noisy" in the sense that ping times were highly variable and had high packet loss, and the number of hops to the internet at large were high, and the baseline latency to the world was also high.

As for instance lifespan, we had numerous instances just "disappear" and then needed to be recreated. We were running a hundred or so for our test so YMMV.

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