Amazon Web Services: EC2 in North California

January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new EC2 in the Northern California region, and I guess I can say that I’m finally done.

Cloud Tips: Understanding Amazon Regions

The process is not too different from simply moving to a new dedicated hosting or to a new EC2 instance in the same region, though there are a few nuances. I was surprised to note that the S3 Fox plugin for Firefox haven’t yet added the new region (Europe is present though). I thought it might not work for some reason (S3 and EC2 being in different regions), but hopefully it does. I also considered using the good old mod_php for Apache instead of running mod_suphp which gave me a tiny boost in performance. All the configurations were straightforward, copy from one EC2, paste into the other. Not without a few changes of course.

I also had a change in the Elastic IP address, but hey that was whitelisted by Twitter! So I guess I’ll have to write to them again for the new whitelisting. Oh well.. One more interesting thing is that I’m now running on an EBS-backed instance, which was introduced by Amazon not so long ago. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting my stuff lost on a terminate or a rebooted machine as the whole drive is being dumped into an EBS. So backups are now completely instant via the AWS Management Console, they’re called Snapshots, takes one click and a few minutes ;) Now if I’d like to terminate one EC2 instance and start the whole thing over on another one, I’d just restore from EBS or Snapshot! Unless, of course, I decide to move to another region. I believe EBS blocks and Snapshots are restricted to regions, furthermore, EBS and EC2 compatibility are restricted to a certain zone in one region, which is obvious. I wouldn’t like to run an EC2 instanced in one data center, backed by a hard drive located in a different one.

Another good question would be Amazon CloudFront. Well, since the S3 buckets haven’t changed, CloudFront should work the way it used to despiting the move. Or at least I hope so ;)

Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs

I’ve been with Amazon for quite a long time now and you must have heard that their web hosting services aren’t very cheap. The average total of one instance per month (including EBS, S3 and all the others) was around $120 at the start. That was back in July 2009 when I had no idea about how all this stuff works. With a lot of experimenting I managed to drop my instance per month costs down by around 40%. Below are a few tips that can help you lower your Amazon Web Services charges:

Cloud Tips: Spare Those Extra Dollars

• Use reserved EC2 Instances where possible. Amazon charges $0.085 per hour for an m1.small Linux instance in the US, that’s around $61 per month and $734 per year. A reserved instance costs me $227 for one year, plus $0.03 per running hour, that makes it around $490 per year for an m1.small instance. Use reserved instances only if you’re sure that you’ll be using it for a whole year. You can save even more if you purchase a reserved instance for three years.
• Storage: EBS vs EC2. Pick EC2! That’s right, EC2! EBS charges you for provisioned storage, IO requests and snapshots. These may rise pretty quickly if you’re running MySQL on an EBS block – very risky! Run your MySQL on EC2. The php files and everything else should preferably be on EC2 aswell. You can use your EBS block for tiny backups of core PHP files if you’re running more than one EC2 instance.
• EBS is cheaper than S3. S3 should only be used in cases where you have to serve your static content from different servers (perhaps through CloudFront), and maybe store some backups there too (don’t forget to remove the old ones!), but EBS is cheaper, even with snapshots.
• CloudFront is okay. It does speed up your website, but you have to know that it’s more expensive for requests to Japan and Hong Kong

There you go. With these tips you should be able to get the Amazon hosting services for around $90/month, unless of course you have a 3 million visitors per day website ;) Also, for those of you wondering.. I haven’t used RackSpace, but I did compare their prices to Amazon’s and they’re more expensive.