Amazon EC2 I discovered Amazon EC2 about 5 months ago while working at my last Job (proficenter.com). Our CEO John Marrah had instructed us that he wanted to take our multi-channel ERP SaaS application and run it in a cloud based environment. This sent me off investigating cloud based solutions and we found Amazon’s EC2. I had some experience using JungleDisk with S3 and was happy with the low-cost storage solution it provided for backing up my local hard drive in the cloud. I opened an account and created/launched some AMIs. We got the app configured and running in the cloud, not two weeks before our parent company (Systemax.com) decided that profitcenter software was no longer and viable option for them, and in the face of the economic collapse, they would be closing the doors and dissolving profitcenter software.

I revisited EC2 a month or so later and started to convert my existing colocated servers to EC2. I was very pleased with Amazon’s architecture and the many features they offered me. I migrated all my web clients and existing servers to EC2 inside of one week. I was able to reduce my monthly hosting bill from $260 MRC to what it is now (approximately $25 MRC). I purchased a reserved instance (m1.small) for 3 years at $276 and my hourly running instance charge is $.03 per hour! I have multiple EBS volumes for my web data mounted on my running instances and I couldn’t be happier with the service. As a result of migrating to Amazon’s EC2 service I thankfully never see myself - driving to a colo facility and racking, installing, and configuring another piece of hardware, every again. Thanks Amazon your service is incredible. There is so much more to say about this service, that I will be posting my experiences with EC2 up here from time to time.

Posted via email from Peter Hallen | Comment »

8:51 am  •  4 October 2009