When I did this last, I used a Rightscale CentOS Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as my basis and built from there. Starting and configuring your micro image I refer you to that article for how to create an account, get a key pair, and configure the security group you will be using. Not much about this part of the process has changed since the last time I wrote. Setting up an EC2 account and configuring security group In this article, I'll describe how to create an image that is compatible with the new micro instances. These instances use the relatively new capability for an image to boot from an EBS volume. Micro instances do not have any local (ephemeral) storage, with all disk access being through Amazon's elastic block store (EBS). However, micro instances are a little different in structure than the original EC2 instances that I described two years ago, so my old setup instructions no longer apply. This site is now running on a micro instance, and I've seen no dropoff in responsiveness in moving from the small instance to a micro one. The sudden scaling capability of a micro instance fits the needs of a traditional website, which won't have high computational needs most of the time. ![]() Note that this is a site you can configure however you like, because it's a pure Unix virtual machine. $5 per month (plus bandwidth and disk space charges, of course) for a website that sits behind Amazon's pipes seems like a pretty good deal to me. If you pay a fee of $82 to reserve a micro instance for three years, your pricing drops to $0.007 per hour or around $5 per month ($7.50 per month with the reservation fee amortized across the three years). Micro instances are only $0.02 per hour, or about $15 per month. Current EC2 pricing has small instances priced at $0.085 per hour, or about $63 per month. This comes with a significant cost decrease for the micro instances. A normal small instance gives 1 EC2 Compute Unit all the time, along with 1.73 GB of memory. A micro instance provides nominal computing power all of the time, with the ability to jump up to 2 EC2 Compute Units on demand, and 613 MB of memory. ![]() In my testing, I've not needed anywhere as near as much processing power or memory as the entry level small instances offer. The new micro instances that Amazon has unveiled are pretty interesting. The only reliability problems I've had have been due to my own stupidity when I've messed up backup scripts or other system configuration settings. I've been able to experiment with new configurations without disrupting the main site by creating virtual clones and playing with them. The performance has been awesome, and the sites have not once slowed down due to spikes in traffic. I've been running both this site and SonoPlot's from an EC2 small instance for the last two years. These rates are very low, and they let you easily scale your site to fit immediate needs. Amazon bills you by the hour that these servers are operating, as well as by the disk capacity and bandwidth they consume. In short, EC2 lets you create virtual servers that run within Amazon's data centers. I covered Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in my previous article, along with the reasons why I think it is a fascinating option for web hosting, so I won't go into detail on that here. In particular, Amazon just introduced their micro instances, which offer you the ability to host a website for as little as $5 a month. Enough has changed in the interim that I figured I'd revisit this article with more up-to-date information. ![]() A while ago, I wrote an article about the steps required to set up a web server that runs the Drupal content management system (like this site).
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