Hosting on Amazon EC2

I’ve done a fair bit more investigation into using EC2 for web hosting and it seems to be something that people do with a fair bit of success. In addition to Geert who commented on my last post and who’s site rifers.org is hosted directly on EC2, there’s also hanzoweb.com and www.gumiyo.com all of which just have their DNS pointing at an EC2 instance.

I still wish Amazon had a preconfigured solution that acted as the web front end and load balancer with a static IP, but it appears that it’s quite feasible to just point your DNS at EC2 and your server seems to stay put.

I’ve also done a bunch of development against S3 with some pretty fantastic results. With a little bit of simple caching it’s actually feasible to run the server here in Australia and store the data on S3 without too much pain. Having very simple APIs is nice because it allows you to build a mock S3 quite easily to use for testing without having to jump through a lot of hoops.

Overall, I’m very impressed – building a web app entirely on S3 is not only feasible, it’s fairly simple and can actually speed up development. There’s even a couple of personal projects of mine that S3 may be a good fit for.