Welcome!

[MartinD]

Hi guys

I'm currently having a virtual server hosted at host-europe.de (2gb ram, 40gb harddisk, root-access etc), at around $30/month. We have around 40 small business webpages hosted on this server and it runs smoothly.

Now I would like to try EC2. However, I just don't get it.

I created an accound at EC2, but it seems like if I start an "instance" (apparently a virtual server, I think?), I have to pay 0.10$ for each hour that it's turned on.

That's 72$ a month for a virtual server, that's quite expensive. So, have I missed a point somewhere?

And btw, is EC2 even suitable for this kind of hosting?

[jock]

Yeah you're right, its running hours. Their small instance servers are pretty powerful though so its like a really high end VPS but is it worth $72?? (that's without bandwidth) you could probably lease a 1U from dell and colo for less!.

You could run it as a dedicated 24/7 VPS but the EC2 idea is that you fire up new instances when traffic dictates, so it would be a lot cheaper than running 24/7 as you'd only power it up for peak time hours etc. So its mainly for large single sites, e.g twitter use it for hosting avatars. Oh yeah DNS is hellish, you'll hit problems with their elastic IP system, and prepare for headaches if you're running mail servers, you don't get reverse IP control, and most of their IPs are blacklisted from mail servers because spammers abuse it pretty badly.

Overall, not worth it for shared hosting in my opinion. However they do become very attractive when it comes to temporary uses like site testing, server moving, etc.