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Amazon EC2 as web server?

Asked 2010-08-16T17:22:30.347
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I have thought a lot recently about the different hosting types that are available out there. We can get pretty decent latency (average) from an EC2 instance in Europe (we're situated in Sweden) and the cost is pretty good. Obviously, the possibility of scaling up and down instances is amazing for us that's in a really expansive phase right now.

From a logical perspective, I also believe that Amazon probably can provide better availability and stability than most hosting companies on the market. Probably it will also outweigh the need of having a phone number to dial when we wonder anything and force us to google the things by ourselves :)

So, what should we be concerned about if we were about to run our web server on EC2? What are the pro's and cons?

To clarify, we will run a pretty standard LAMP configuration with memcached added probably.

Thanks

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The other con no one has mentioned:

With a stock EC2 server, if an instance goes down, it "goes away." Any information on the local disk is gone, and gone forever. You have the added responsibility of ensuring that any information you want to survive a server restart is persisted off of the EC2 instance (into S3, RDS, EBS, or some other off-server service).

answered 2010-08-22T19:43:25.780

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