Dec 132012
 

After last time fire sale I have 3 micro instances running on EC2, one in east coast and two in west. I got a mail the other day, saying my free tier is expiring so I need to make decision if I need to keep it running or not.

It did take me quite some time to figure our which one is free tier, which one is the reserved instance and which one is the left – I have to blame myself as it’s me who made the configuration this messy. Anyway, it seems my major site is running on the free tier (w1), and my reseved instance is actually idle (w2), and the secondary site is on a pay-as-you-go instance (w3).

Anyway, since the free tire will be expired by the end of this month and the reserved instance will be expired in mid January, I decided doing nothing by now. Once the reserved (idle) instace on east cost expired, I will shut it down.

I will keep pay-as-you-go as I got feeling that I may switch to other service providers later on, at least I should try out those Amazon competiters.

Apr 302012
 

I just removed a primary backup from Amazon S3 after putting it into GMail, I just wish GMail will be secure enough – whenever I’m saying secure, I mean mails won’t be deleted without being notified in advance, either purposely or not.

I still have backups on other places but none of them are primary, that is, they can be deleted without any reason, and without carefully being watched.

Jan 132012
 

I’ve moved to Amazon EC2 as mentioned here and mentioned the monthly pay is $17, that was based on EC2 node’s cost is $14 I think, and after dig into EC2’s offers, I found something more useful, see below:

Amazon has this Reserved Instance which is pretty good to Web servers that needs to be running for all the time, I did some calculation and here is the comparison for 1-year term:

Plan One time Hourly Yearly Monthly (alloc.)
On demand 0 0.020 175.20 14.60
light 23 0.012 128.12 10.68
medium 54 0.007 115.32 9.61
heavy 62 0.005 105.80 8.82

Although 3-years term may save more, I don’t want to sign such a long contract as $8.82 per month is good enough to me now.

I will move to the heavy one after my free tier expires.

Jan 042012
 

I’ve moved all my blog sites (why do I have so many? :-W ) to an Amazon EC2 micro instance running Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit version, everything seems good so far and I will let it running there for a week or two before doing the switch. The most important factor that will or will not make the transition is cost – based on my rough calculation the cost for EC2 will be something around $17 (forget the free tier, I have to pay for it after one year anyway), and Linode is $19.99.

If these blog sites work fine, I will try to put some other stuffs over EC2, and at the same time, try out EC2 work with S3 and SDB.

Dec 312011
 

I’m in the middle of moving some stuffs to Amazon AWS, and the first project is moving back up of my friend’s web site to Amazon as it gets no online access and data volume is not that big. The test seems good so far with my (first year) free AWS S3, I will stop current backup plan which sending data to my personal server in a week or two.

Amazon did great job to ease usage of AWS at least for S3, and based on my limited experience on EC2 it is not that hard to deploy but I still need to figure out how difficult it is to deploy multiple instances in a programable way as this will be the most reasonable way to get things done.

I’m currently on AWS Free Usage Tier, good way to evaluate how much I’m going to spend in a serious project.