Amazon Elastic CloudAmazon Elastic Cloud, or clould computing in general is a virtual sea of computers, ready to use on demand. These virtual computers can have a wide array of Linux, and now microsoft operating systems run on them. There is a large community of generous folks who setup Amazon Machine Images for public use, for instance you are reading this page on an Ubuntu server configured for LAMP. The images are in a huge library which can be searched, and an AMI can be found to suite your business needs. Pricing for an instance in the cloud is between shared hosting and a dedicated server, see this link for a current price list. There are three basic charges, one for the time the machine runs, another for the data which goes in and out of the cloud, and another for static storage. There are other serverice like a cloud database solution, but you can also run a MySQL server on your own machine. Some issues you run into when in the cloude. First, when you start an instance, it is like booting from a CD, and when the machine runs, there is disk space, and files can be saved. When the instance is terminated, everything goes away. This brings up the need for persistant storage, and a backup plan. Amazon offers snapshots of your persistant storeage, or you can use another solution. The next problem is sending mail from one of your servers. It appears the spammers have figured out cloud computers make good spambots, so mail to yahoo and gmail most likely will be blocked. Using a SMTP relay service will fix this problem. |