Thread

Yesterday, I had a talk with a client and he’s massively interested in Amazons EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) - mostly because it allows to setup an environment where you only pay for the resources really used.

To be honest, I don’t know much about EC2 and don’t have access to it (seems to be still in limited beta). I heard/read some things about problems storing persistent data, because the virtual instance is gone and another re-instantiated from an image at some time. But I have no details right know. Google finds lots of pages, but getting a first impression (especially regarding EE in EC2) seems to be painful without having something to play with.

Does anyone has experience with EC2? Would it be possible to setup EE in thus an environment? How about images uploaded and changes to the database? Would there be any legal concerns regarding the EE license?

-Markus

I have used EC2.  It works just like any other dedicated server but it is generally not good for web hosting.  As mentioned there are the problems of no persistent data and no dedicated IP address.  I would not recommend using EC2 for web hosting.  The Joyeur blog from Joyent has a couple of articles that discuss EC2. 

I think that for the cost of an EC2 instance for a month you would be just as well off getting something like a VPS from Slicehost or an Accelerator from Joyent (more expensive.)  Of course EngineHosting has great dedicated hosting options but I am not a high roller.  😉