Amazon EC2
 

Has anyone here used Amazon EC2 at all? I'm considering the possibility of moving Nexodyne to EC2 as it may be more cost effective than a full dedicated server, but would be interested to know what other people's experiences of it are before I dedicate too much time to it!

Thought I ought to write a quick update on this having tried out EC2.

I think the main drawback currently is the lack of multiple IP addresses per instance, and I think that even if they do move to allow you to have multiple addresses, it won't be sufficient as they will most likely continue to implement it as they do now with the public IP addresses translated to the single internal IP. This causes problems for SSL and segregation of sites.

There are some suggested solutions, like setting up a load balancer for each IP address and then using them to forward traffic to different ports instead of IPs, but that's not an entirely watertight solution either (not to mention the fact that it's rather expensive).

All in all, an interesting distraction for a few hours (and $0.16) but not (yet) a viable alternative to our dedicated server.

You should talk with Mitch - he's got quite a fair bit of experience under his belt with EC2 and other cloud-based hosting solutions.

If bandwidth is a huge issue maybe offloading static content would be a solution (and downgrading to a VPS for the rest)

This would be possible, but factoring in EC2 bandwidth, and a VPS on top, even with the cheaper reserved EC2 instances, we'd about match our current expenditure on the dedicated server, so it doesn't seem really worth the effort.