Amazon ec2 experiences?

Francie Barrett

I have a website that is currently being hosted on a friends box for free, unfortunately, I am about to be kicked off that box and now have to look for an alternative home for my application. It looks like Amazon ec2 might be the most flexible solution, so I am considering going down that route. I am just looking for some opinions and users experiences of the platform before I decide to commit.

The website is basically a Java EE web app (that servers a mixture of static and dynamic content) that is hosted on Tomcat. There is also a Wordpress blog that is linked to from the Java web app that is also hosted on the Tomcat web server. The back end is Mysql, which maintains the wordpress and the app database. I currently have 25mb's of data written to my Wordpress database and 12mb's of data written to my app database.

In terms of traffic, it varies from day to day. During a weekday, I am looking at maybe 400-500 hits. At a weekend, that spikes to 1200-2000 hits. I don't know how much data transfer is going on, but I would put a ballpark figure of there being 10 gigs of traffic a month. There are very few images on the site, and no music or videos that are being hosted. I do have one cron job that executes at night (running a script), the data transfers/connections that are made are generally very small (talking at most 1-2 megs of data transfer and a few hundred rows being updated on the DB).

From what I have read, I should just about be able to get my site running on a Micro ec2 instance using a Linux server (and probably not have to pay anything for the first year for the free usage tier). Even after that, I don't mind paying the €25 a month or so that I would expect to be charged.

Has anyone done anything similar to what I am doing? Any thoughts on migration of my existing app? Any tips on using the Amazon micro instance?

ChRoMe

Francie Barrett wrote: »

I have a website that is currently being hosted on a friends box for free, unfortunately, I am about to be kicked off that box and now have to look for an alternative home for my application. It looks like Amazon ec2 might be the most flexible solution, so I am considering going down that route. I am just looking for some opinions and users experiences of the platform before I decide to commit.

The website is basically a Java EE web app (that servers a mixture of static and dynamic content) that is hosted on Tomcat. There is also a Wordpress blog that is linked to from the Java web app that is also hosted on the Tomcat web server. The back end is Mysql, which maintains the wordpress and the app database. I currently have 25mb's of data written to my Wordpress database and 12mb's of data written to my app database.

In terms of traffic, it varies from day to day. During a weekday, I am looking at maybe 400-500 hits. At a weekend, that spikes to 1200-2000 hits. I don't know how much data transfer is going on, but I would put a ballpark figure of there being 10 gigs of traffic a month. There are very few images on the site, and no music or videos that are being hosted. I do have one cron job that executes at night (running a script), the data transfers/connections that are made are generally very small (talking at most 1-2 megs of data transfer and a few hundred rows being updated on the DB).

From what I have read, I should just about be able to get my site running on a Micro ec2 instance using a Linux server (and probably not have to pay anything for the first year for the free usage tier). Even after that, I don't mind paying the €25 a month or so that I would expect to be charged.

Has anyone done anything similar to what I am doing? Any thoughts on migration of my existing app? Any tips on using the Amazon micro instance?

I found it too easy for Amazon to start charging stupid amounts of money on that small of a scale. So no mods get upset I'll PM you the name of a provider that I run a tomcat instance along with wordpress for something like 10USD a month.

magooly

I deployed a Spring MVC webapp to an ec2(micro ubuntu) instance a month ago. For the first week I would loose connection frequently but its been stable now for about a month or so.

Interested in replies here also re pricing and reliability and bandwidth once the thing goes whatsapp.

Slaanesh

Give digitalocean.com a look. Very cheap hosting. I'm running a small webapp on it at the moment and having no problems. I'm using the minimal $5 a month package.