[Noisebridge-discuss] could you host my media wiki pages, 2-4 months?

[John Adams]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Ronald Cotoni <setient at gmail.com> wrote:

> Huh.  ec2 instances are not backed up unless you write scripts to back
> them up to SOMEWHERE.  They are not salable unless you actually make them
> scalable (mysql replication, load balancing).  It isn't the "cloud" like
> you think it is.  Also ec2 or ec2 clones are over priced for a single wiki.
>  www.lowendbox.com for significantly cheaper VPS servers (that is really
> all ec2 is by itself).   Also, I don't charge for hosting sites.  At all.
>  You should really take a look at the hosting options out there
> and evaluate them first hand before deciding for or against ec2 or really
> any other option there.
>
>

That www.lowendbox.com site looks like it was made in 1994 with Crayons. As
he's running a blog that aggregates locations for cheap VPS, his site is
fairly useful even if I don't like the design, though. With Amazon, if you
want to go on the cheap, run a micro instance.

Much of EC2 is backed up, The (stored version) of instance itself is held
in S3 which is guaranteed against data loss.

For data persistance across instances, you can mount EBS under LVM and
schedule LVM snapshots of the EBS instance off to S3 via cron, guaranteed
against data loss.  If you want to scale, you run more than one instance
and use the load balancer functionality built into EC2 with dedicated,
reserved IPs. If you want to auto-scale, use the autoscaler.
http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/

There's a fundamental theory underpinning the EC2 strategy - You expect,
demand, and want failure to occur. No single box or storage area is worth
anything and when failure occurs you just move to a different instance.
With MySQL, the whole concept of there being a Master (SPOF) and a Slave
(yay, another SPOF) limits your ability to scale at all. Of course, If you
don't want to fight with MySQL replication you can use Dynamo or other
NoSQL stores instead of Mysql. While this requires substantially more labor
and changes to code, it

If you wanted to stick with MySQL, you could use Amazon RDS or migrate code
to Amazon Simple DB. Both have high SLAs.

So, fine, you have to set some things up, but it is *exactly* the "cloud"
like I think it is. It's no hardware, no racking of gear, no dealing with
networking, nothing. It's purely a software argument at that point and if
the OS gets fucked up, I issue a single command and poof! A brand new
machine in exactly the same configuration I was in a moment ago.

Times have changed and the days of screwing around with hardware to run a
small business or website are mostly over.

---
John
Twitter
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