I have the domain figaf.com where I’m hosting a CMS joomla site with some tools I have created. There is not a lot of traffic on the site. There are currently only 200 visitors a day, so it does not require a large server. The application that I’m using requires command access to run. I could therefore not use a hosted PHP plan. I therefore had to somehow get a server or use Virtual Private Server. I liked the idea of being able to scale the business after the needs.
I original choose Amazon EC2 because it was the only place I could rent servers for a low monthly rate. I did not find slicehosts plans attractive in comparison. They seem too small for what I needed, because I did not have any idea of what I needed.
I have now decided to move to Mosso. Mosso is Rackspaces name for Slicehost, after Rackspaces acquired Slicehost.
The advantages of Mosso are:
- Plans starts with just 256Mb ram while EC2 has 1.7Gb.
- Backup for small servers is done with a click in the control panel.
The Amazon EC2 solution has the following advantages:
- Datacenters in both US and Europe giving lower roundtrip times.
- Large verity of images from different vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM
- Auto scaling and load balancer application, so it is easy to customize the operation of the scalable web infrastructure.
- No cost on data to the S3 service, where data and backups can be stored.
- The ability to customize backup and additional storage capabilities with Elastic Block storage.
- EC2 has a proven API, where Mosso is just releasing their version.
The Pricing of the 2Gb Mosso and the 1.7Gb EC2 is about the same. So it should not be the reason to choose any of the services.
I have not compared the CPU speed of the two solutions. Mosso says that it will allow the extra capacity to be shared among the instance running, so you might get more CPU cycles here.
I will continue to use EC2 for testing SAP software running on windows. Because the I’m not required to purchase hardware for the tests.
So…why are you switching from EC2?
Because of the cheaper plans for hosting my website.
I found this post on a search for help setting up Joomla on EC2. If you’re like me and have no experience with ssh command line tools, the farthest you’ll get is setting up your instance, attaching a storage volume, and setting your elastic IP. Then you’ll need someone to come in and do the rest. RackSpace Cloud Sites (formerly Mosso) has a great control panel (although you can’t see hidden files like .htaccess) and 24/7 support (although they can’t help with script support). Now for $100 a month you get a service that will automatically scale to meet demands of your site, but with RackSpace Cloud servers and Amazon EC2, you have to scale manually, or you’ll have to set up other tools to scale for you. In my case, sorry to say, neither solution (Cloud Sites or EC2) has been problem free, as you will get endless errors trying to install Joomla extensions on RS Cloud Sites, and support won’t/can’t help. I’m staying with Rochen for now, even though data transfer speeds are less than ideal in Asia. Hope this helps some prepare for the move to the cloud.
@Kevin
Hi kevin I do have some esperiance with SSH, so it just took some time to get it working.
I’m also using dreamhost.com for some of my other sites. There the Joomila setup is a onclick installer. It works really well. But the app run in a safemode.
/daniel