Re: The Cloud

1

Having your own server is cool. But EC2 and the other cloud services are prohibitively expensive for personal use. Take a look at Linode, though.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:28 PM
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Huh, I'll check that out. I thought that pay-for-what-you-use would keep EC2 costs down. What are we talking for a mail/web server that gets almost no traffic?


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:30 PM
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$20/month for their cheapest option. You do all maintenance and installation, though; basically you get a virtual machine on which you can install anything you want.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:33 PM
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I think the problem with EC2 as of right now is that the storage for each of the nodes is ephemeral so that you would need some way to persist your data to S3. There is a plan by amazon to offer persistent disks for EC2, but I don't think it is in production yet.


Posted by: CJB | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:35 PM
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5

You're talking about Linode, right? What about for EC2?


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:35 PM
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Why are you so stuck on EC2?


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:38 PM
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||

Half-million-dollar carp scam.

It's not just home-buyers. This is starting to affect real people.

|>


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:38 PM
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Just to keep an EC2 instance running for a month will cost you $366.28, if I'm understanding their calculator correctly.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:39 PM
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That's right, Ben, make it personal. EC2 is the one I know and I know a lot of corporations use it; I'm curious about how much it costs in practice.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:39 PM
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10
This concept is similar in nature to previous fraudulent humanitarian carp proposals Powell has presented to over 40 investors dating back to 1992.

Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:39 PM
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11
This concept is similar in nature to previous fraudulent humanitarian carp proposals Powell has presented to over 40 investors dating back to 1992.

Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:40 PM
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a month will cost you $366.28

Holy shit.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:40 PM
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12: That's almost eight pounds of chicken.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:42 PM
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Holy shit.

Dude, what did I tell you? It's not aimed at personal users, it's aimed at businesses. For a small company, paying that to keep your hand in so that you can scale immediately if traffic takes off is nothing, but for a personal user it makes no sense whatsoever.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:42 PM
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Oh wait, I see that that was for both a small instance and a large instance. If you just go with the small instance, it's only $73/month, but something like Linode still blows it out of the water.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:44 PM
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Hey, screw you guys. I'm putting a trafficless server on EC2. That'll show you.

Well, there are lots of virtual server offerings (we looked at them for Unfogged), but I figured that Amazon's really would scale (unlike, say, Media Temple, where the site was briefly hosted, and which was incredibly slow).


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:45 PM
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Hey, screw you guys. I'm putting a trafficless server on EC2. That'll show you.

Why not just pay me the $73/month instead? You'll get the same value out of it.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:49 PM
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The value is in fiddling with it and getting something set up on EC2, man.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:51 PM
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The value is in fiddling with it and getting something set up on EC2, man.

Oh, you're looking for a new job. Okay then.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:55 PM
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Josh probably won't let you fiddle with him for just $73 a month.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:55 PM
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I should ask him.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 5:57 PM
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22

I also have a "pay-for-what-you-use" policy. My rates are higher, though.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:05 PM
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||
I want you all to read Taibbi's new article wherein he is undercover with Hagee's supremely manly homosocial church.

I would like to add him to my man-harem.

|>


Posted by: oudemia | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:08 PM
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Ahem -- Taibbi not Hagee.


Posted by: oudemia | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:08 PM
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What's a "ten-alarm soccer mom?" I think I want one.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:13 PM
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23:

The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength.

Awesome.


Posted by: Wrongshore | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:19 PM
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"My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:22 PM
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You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks.

This is not always a bad thing.


Posted by: Wrongshore | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:31 PM
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29

stephouse.net will let you co-lo a mac mini for $30/mo


Posted by: Clint | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:31 PM
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I wondered the same thing about a ten-alarm soccer mom.

Also, what a depressing article.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:41 PM
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"Rum-balakasha-oom!" shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. "Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of philosophy!"

Can I have an Amen!


Posted by: oudemia | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 6:45 PM
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With ec2 and associated services, it's interesting to see how the venderable pay-per-cpu-time-slice model of computing has made a comeback in the era of suddenly spiking bandwidth demand. That was supposed to be a dead approach, from the days when cpu power was too expensive to own on your own. But now the bottleneck is elsewhere.


Posted by: Gonerill | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 8:19 PM
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I got EC2 up and working as a backup solution for a physical server, once. I think it took a couple of evenings. There was a lot dealing with keys and configurations and shit. But I was impressed.

I plan to migrate my personal server to it at some point. I like the idea that if I screw some configuration, I can just reload my archived instance and do it again.

I was on something like Linode for a while, found it a bit limiting. But its good for a small deployment that doesn't need to scale.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 8:19 PM
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OT: Cheddar, if aged long enough, will acquire little crunchy bits like Parmesan. I have some 10 year old stuff in fridge that makes your back teeth ache when you bite into it.


Posted by: Chopper | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 9:13 PM
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You call that off-topic? What that is, Chopper, is posted in the wrong thread.


Posted by: Auto-banned | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 9:40 PM
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Sounds like you should clean out your fridge, Choppo.


Posted by: ben w-lfs-n | Link to this comment | 04-24-08 9:41 PM
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35: Too true. Commenting semi-drunk from a handheld: not the best strategy.


Posted by: Chopper | Link to this comment | 04-25-08 8:58 AM
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THat cheese is insanely good, though--you don't even want to eat it on a cracker, it might fuck up the pure cheddary goodness.


Posted by: Chopper | Link to this comment | 04-25-08 8:59 AM
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EC2 will scale, but not automatically. Each instance is a relatively slight machine, it's just that you can make as many of them as you need. But you're still responsible for setting them up so that load is balanced between them, and databases are replicated, and all that other fun stuff. Round-robin DNS is simple and good enough for a first pass, but you'll still need to replicate files across the instances or set up an NFS share (unless S3 can suffice). Not that scaling should ever be a concern for someone's personal webpage and email.

Anyway if you really want to mess around with this stuff why not wait until some more slots open up in Google's AppEngine project? The basic offering is expected to be free. And it's built around Python, a language about which which I'm sure Ben will be happy to lend countless hours of tedious assistance.


Posted by: Tom | Link to this comment | 04-25-08 8:59 AM
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(There are companies that offer web interfaces for launching scalable EC2 instance suites that are preconfigured to handle the tasks described above; but seriously, you don't need that.)


Posted by: Tom | Link to this comment | 04-25-08 9:02 AM
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Post by the guy at NYTimes who used EC2 when they took their 1851-1980 archives from TIFFs to PDFs to make available online.

As noted above best use now is for commercial short-term projects or varying loads. A lot of upside though. The scale and mechanics of operating the back-ends are ultimately going to kill off (or at least severely limit the scope of most in-house "industry" datacenters). One of the trends (in addition to following the cheap power) is placement in colder areas, since cooling is an expense otherwise. Southwestern US datacenter industry was a poor choice placement for energy considerations (putting hot things in a hot place ...) and will disappear over next x years.


Posted by: JP Stormcrow | Link to this comment | 04-25-08 12:22 PM
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Anyway if you really want to mess around with this stuff why not wait until some more slots open up in Google's AppEngine project?

Somehow I don't think ogged is down for building his own blog app.


Posted by: Josh | Link to this comment | 04-25-08 4:35 PM
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