Advice on EC2 & Pricing: Too much for infrequent use?

Feathers

Not happy with my current provider for hosting: trying to upgrade a WP site at the minute though & getting frustrated at the fact I'm still on PHP4 with them, among other things :mad:

I've only got a basic LAMP package, which most of the time is enough — using it for backing my own domain (though there's not much too it at the moment apart from a link to my e-mail :rolleyes: ) and a few side projects for friends that require very little bandwidth, etc. — mostly Wordpress or Drupal sites.

Though since I'm thinking about switching now, would be handy to have the option to deploy stuff in Play Framework or Ruby to have a bit of a play with those, have started looking to the likes of EC2. The only think that worries me is the pricing on it — could always just do this stuff locally on a laptop, but nice to have access from multiple places on it.

Basically — do any of you have EC2 or similar for personal projects, and how much do you need to use it to get the value out of it? I'm paying about €30/year at the moment, IIRC.

Sparks

Ross had a good bit on this the other day - basicly, a Hetzner server (like the one I use) comes to basicly $60 per month and an Amazon m1.small reserved instance used for a year works out to $30 per month (it has half the ram and two-thirds the disk space, approximately).

It's definitely past the point where cloud servers are cost-competitive; I'd switch to one if it wasn't for the point that I prefer running on metal (I'm old-fashioned that way I guess, I like to know where my data is, geographically and jurisdictionally, if that's even a word...)

Feathers

Sparks wrote: »

Ross had a good bit on this the other day - basicly, a Hetzner server (like the one I use) comes to basicly $60 per month and an Amazon m1.small reserved instance used for a year works out to $30 per month (it has half the ram and two-thirds the disk space, approximately).

It's definitely past the point where cloud servers are cost-competitive; I'd switch to one if it wasn't for the point that I prefer running on metal (I'm old-fashioned that way I guess, I like to know where my data is, geographically and jurisdictionally, if that's even a word...)

Cheers for the link! Yeah, I think even $30/mnth is probably outside of my 'messing around' budget — at least til a pay rise — don't think I can justify the spend for over and above a basic lamp set-up somewhere. But… on looking at Amazon again see they now have a year's free trial!

Enoying doing little bits of server config in work, so will give it a go I think & have a play around with it — no harm getting more famililar in that area too.

Thanks for the reply!

dalta5billion

Feathers wrote: »

Cheers for the link! Yeah, I think even $30/mnth is probably outside of my 'messing around' budget — at least til a pay rise — don't think I can justify the spend for over and above a basic lamp set-up somewhere. But… on looking at Amazon again see they now have a year's free trial!

Enoying doing little bits of server config in work, so will give it a go I think & have a play around with it — no harm getting more famililar in that area too.

Thanks for the reply!

Absolutely no harm in getting the year free trial. It's handy to have it for anything, be it a proxy for when you're abroad (it's in Ireland) or just running a personal site. I personally just need it for testing connectivity (Have no other location to test to).

IRLConor

Don't discount using EC2 micro instances either. You'd probably be surprised at how much you can get out of them if you're smart about how you use them. They're ~$9 - ~$15 per month depending on how much you're willing to spend up front.