next »

[golgorand]

With all the talk about cloud hosting, most comparisons on the internet talk about Google App Engine (GAE), Amazon EC2 and even Windows Azure.

I was curious if anyone has had any experience with other web hosting sites that claim to offer cloud hosting (GoGrid, Omnis, etc.).

I want my app to use the usual MySQL/PHP back-end technology, if that matters in any way.

Any opinions/experiences?

[fupersly]

Hi -

Cloud hosting shouldn't really matter too much for your purposes unless you require heavy disk IO.  Disk IO is slower through a hypervisor for technical reasons I've never bothered to look into but you can google it to confirm.  This is true on EC2 which uses a modified version of Xen I'm told.  I am not 100% sure if this is true with other vendors like VMWare or virtualbox.

[mcc]

I've used EC2 at work, it's actually fantastic on all levels but for indie games stuff I do not think it's a good call, you will find it overpowered and overpriced for what you're doing. (The pricing structure is such that you will get a good deal if you're doing enterprise-level stuff, but for small potatoes stuff you'll wind up paying more than you should.)

Appengine is interesting, the pricing model is good and it scales such that it supports enterprise levels of traffic but can still be used for (in fact is free for) small potatoes stuff. The downside is that it is very inconvenient to port things on or off appengine. You cannot run most off the shelf web/networking packages on appengine, you must code your app for appengine and once it's on it is an incredible hassle to run it anywhere else.

What I would suggest is just renting a xen Instance somewhere. This will give you what appears to you to be a dedicated server for a low monthly fee. What I want to do is recommend Slicehost, they will give you a high-powered instance for as low as $20/month. However they are going to be doing something weird over the next few months where they merge normal Slicehost with their cloud solution. I do not know what the final outcome of this will be (however it may be sufficient for your purposes since I suspect this cloud solution may wind up being more cost appropriate at the low end than AWS). You can get cheaper-than-Slicehost xen hosting if you really dig but the level of service may not be as good. The only thing "cloud" will buy you over a xen instance is elastic load balancing, but you must design your app intentionally to support elastic balancing and it probably does not make sense to take this step unless you have a specific reason to believe you will need it.

[lansing]

I've used EC2 at work, it's actually fantastic on all levels but for indie games stuff I do not think it's a good call, you will find it overpowered and overpriced for what you're doing. (The pricing structure is such that you will get a good deal if you're doing enterprise-level stuff, but for small potatoes stuff you'll wind up paying more than you should.)

I'm using EC2 and doing about 4GB data a month and haven't been charged more than 50 cents per month.  Seems pretty cheap to me.

[bateleur]

I'm using EC2 and doing about 4GB data a month and haven't been charged more than 50 cents per month.  Seems pretty cheap to me.

Do you mean EC2 or S3?

EC2 is charged by the hour, not by data volume. Although I agree it's quite affordable. Anyone who doesn't think so probably hasn't discovered micro instances yet. At $0.02/hour they work out a fraction of the price of running your own server even if you keep one running constantly!

[golgorand]

Thanks for all you feedback, guys.

I don't have much experience with server-side programming, but from what I've read, I'm concerned with two technical aspects:
- Bandwidth
- CPU load from the database reads/writes
Of course, I want to keep the cost as low as possible

For this first project, the quantity of information exchanged will be small and the database operations aren't very elaborate, so it may not be a problem if there aren't many users.

I'm just trying to be safe in case the app is wildly popular (I'm a bit of an optmimist).

If EC2 is cheap for small transactions, I may take a deeper look at it.

[Nix]

An interesting read about amazon cloud services:

http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
(linked from that article)https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=65649&tstart=0

[Kunal]

I believe EC2 is also free for the lowest tier, so it might not hurt to try it out. This tier only supports a single 'micro' instance running linux though. They also have free tiers for bandwidth usage and storage.

You should also be able to find a Amazon machine image that has apache+mysql+php installed. It really is quite painless.

[kason.xiv]

I've used AWS/EC2 for maaaany projects, and I also have some exposure to Azure. I definitely prefer the AWS toolchain. That said, I've heard great things (especially in terms of price) about DigitalOcean and if I was going to start up a new personal project I would probably try that out.