VPS or Cloud ?

July 24, 2008

My VPS Link account is up for renewel. Right now I’m paying $25 / mo for:

256 MB Ram
300 GB Bandwith
10 GB storage

I’ve got an ubuntu virtual machine running on Xen. So far everythings worked great.

But so far I’ve been the only user.

As I get closer and closer to launch, that nagging question keeps coming to mind… Will my server handle the load? I know next to nothing about load balancers and server management. I could learn, but I feel this would be a heavy distraction with very little end-user benefit (well, aside from uptime/reliability/ and all that jazz).

The next nagging thought: “well maybe i should switch to a cloud.” I’ve heard great things about Amazon EC2 and S3. Aside from a few recent hiccups, it seems an ideal solution for a small website with (hopefully) high growth potential.

A good resource: 10 Creative Ways to Use Amazon’s Web Service . Most telling:

Webmail, an email hosting company, turned to Amazon Web Services for better reliability as well as cost. They were able to cut their costs by 75% using Amazon’s S3, Simple Queue Service and EC2. Webmail touts Amazon’s services as a shift from

“do-it-yourself to let-the-experts-do-it.”

I’m going to look into this…