Amazon Web Services
I spent a while today playing around with Amazon Web Services, mainly their S3 and EC2 services. I’m quite impressed at how quickly you can get started. S3 is basically just file hosting with an API, but it has an interesting feature where it will allow you to host a static web site from S3. I ended up posting some test content there called Ynyth(). I also set up a few server instances on EC2 and while the free “tiny” instance is good enough for a low-traffic blog or something, it choked and died after I tried to set up a Minecraft server on it. So I added another instance with a Minecraft server and it runs swimmingly now, although it will cost me a little bit. I’m not sure about the rates—that’s the main problem is how confusing the rates are, and you never really know how much you’ll have to pay until you actually get the bill. Still, my usage is small so I doubt it will be more than a few cents.
The main advantage offered here is scalability. I already use NearlyFreeSpeech.net which has a similar pay-as-you-go billing model, but it’s not very scalable and, truth be told, a little slow. With AWS you can easily adapt to changing needs and that flexibility is likely worth the extra cost. I’m sold.