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1000 Lbs Web Hosting Gorilla: Amazon?

October 27, 2006

http://www.colszoo.org/animalareas/aforest/afjpegs/specigif/gorilla/gorilla_r1_c1.gifIf you are in the hosting business I would look over your shoulder, because your favorite bookseller is making big wins in the web hosting business.  What?  Yes, Amazon is really making an impact in the space and big hosting companies are starting to feel it.  We are incorporating their services in EVERYTHING we are doing.  The Amazon web services products (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - EC2 and Amazon S3) are built for the little guy AND the big guy.

For the Small Guy:  I like to call Amazon’s web services “zero point capital” for startups.  For no money (i.e. the zero point) you can build as many servers as your web application needs ~ your startup only pays when it uses Amazon’s computing resources (i.e. when you have users/customers).  I know of more than ten startups in Dallas that are using Amazon’s services as a way to start without spending any money on servers, bandwidth and colocation.  This is big.

For the Big Guy:  If your web service is successful, but need a quick way to scale Amazon is the perfect solution.  Architel was working with Linden Labs (Second Life) this summer to help them with a data center solution here in Dallas.  Working with PAIX/Switch & Data who would provide ping, power and pipe (i.e. the data center) the Architel team would provide the support.  Linden Labs planned to install one rack of servers each week for the foreseeable future.  Since we would be responsible for unpacking and installing each server we suggested they consider Amazon’s EC2 and S3 instead since we could support it just as easily.  Today Linden Labs uses Amazon for their client downloads (this is especially important when they update their client for all 1MM users).  Jeff explains how it is working:

In case you’re curious, we switched over halfway during release day; but even for the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far- which I’d estimate to be around 30,000-38,000 downloads. This does not include the first several hours of the download rush, which are typically the highest.  In case you’re wondering how the client auto-updater works: it actually contacts the website for a special script, which finds the latest version, and then makes a request to download the file through HTTP, just like a regular web download. This is why the Amazon S3 switch is transparent, even to the auto-updater; when the auto-updater makes a request to get the file through HTTP, our website receives that says, “Aha! You really want to go to this Amazon S3 URL, here ya go.”

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog 

Comments

13 Responses to “1000 Lbs Web Hosting Gorilla: Amazon?”

  1. Jeremiah Owyang Says:
    October 27th, 2006 at 7:24 pm

    It’s more than just web hosting alex, they’re core offering of S3 is really Storage, the bandwidth is a secondary feature of that offering.

    Amazon is also offering pay-as-you go computing with their other service.

    If this takes off, it’s disruptive to many companies that offer fixed assets

    I’ve written 40 thoughts about the future of online data storage here:

    http://tinyurl.com/y7bax3

  2. Alexander Muse Says:
    October 27th, 2006 at 9:19 pm

    I am not sure what the disconnect is, S3 is the storage component and EC2 is the server component. The combination of the two really blows up the traditional hosting model - i.e. I rent a server from a hosting company…

  3. Alex Pooley Says:
    October 29th, 2006 at 8:53 am

    I agree that this stuff is pretty exciting. I use S3 to host my static assets (images, js, css, html, etc) for my real time web based chat system http://www.scribblehere.com.

    However, I think your paragraph under the “For the Small Guy” is incorrect or mis-leading?

    My understanding of EC2 is that you are charged for EC2 while your server instance is online, which includes when your server is idle. So from a web hosting perspective ‘for the small guy’ it’s not so great. From memory the minimum cost of a web server on EC2 is $76 a month. Which still isn’t bad…

    Feel free to chat to me about this comment at http://www.scribblehere.com/25 :)

  4. Alexander Muse Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    Alex, we are not getting billed the $76 per month. I checked the billing FAQ and it said you only pay for what you use at .10 per instant hour. Here is the entry from Amazon:

    Q: How will I be charged and billed for my use of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3?

    Amazon EC2 pricing and billing
    Amazon EC2 charges will be billed at the end of the month according to the pricing schedule below.

    * Pay for only what you use.
    * $0.10 per instance hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
    * $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).

    Data transferred within the Amazon EC2 environment, or between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

    Amazon S3 pricing and billing
    Amazon S3 usage is billed separately from Amazon EC2. Like with Amazon EC2, charges will be billed at the end of the month according to the regular Amazon S3 pricing schedule.

    * $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
    * $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e. Internet traffic)

    You will be charged for the transfer of your custom AMIs from your environment to Amazon S3, and storage of that image until deletion, but you will not be billed for any bandwidth between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

    You may view your Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 charges by going to your Account Activity page, located as an option under the “Your Web Services Account” button on the AWS web site.

  5. Brian Breslin Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 4:43 pm

    Alex, how hard is it to deploy dynamic apps, like RoR on EC2? Whats the minimum they would charge for one instance then if its not $76?

  6. Alexander Muse Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

    Not hard to run Ruby applications (i.e. that is all we do). What is the minimum? For one instance I think we are paying almost (less than a dollar) nothing per month - all of the traffic has been internal.

  7. CM Says:
    October 31st, 2006 at 12:34 pm

    I think there is a big difference between S3 and EC2 as far as use for the small guy. S3 works great for the small guy because it is a one for one replacement for static hosting. EC2’s problem is that it is not a one for one replacement for dynamic applications. Out of all the issues that EC2 has the transient nature of each node’s storage is the most important. Of course you can come up with any number of ways to get around this issue but for someone starting out why waste the time and over complicate your application? IMHO a better solution for the small guy is the Media Temple Grid-Server (http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/). For the big guy or the small guy moving up EC2 does start to make sense because you can spend more time figuring out how you are going to store your dynamic data so that an outage on your node doesn’t sink your entire ship.

  8. Brian Breslin Says:
    October 31st, 2006 at 2:52 pm

    so since ec2 is filled up, any tips on how to get into the beta group?

  9. Alexander Muse Says:
    October 31st, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    Hm… wait?

  10. lukem Says:
    October 31st, 2006 at 9:41 pm

    See http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?messageID=42223&#42223 for confirmation of the above.

  11. Alexander Muse Says:
    November 1st, 2006 at 12:24 pm

    You can turn the instance off and on. When it is off you don’t get billed.

  12. Texas Startup Blog: Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Texas » Blog Archive » New Amazon Web Service? Says:
    December 1st, 2006 at 3:44 pm

    [...] Mike Arrington reported that Amazon may have a new web service coming called “SDS” or Simple Data Service.  The Amazon web services unit has brought us EC2 and S3 as well as the Mechanical Turk.  Amazon mentioned it on their site, but as soon as Mike reported on it they removed the reference.  Mike has the cache of it on his site. [...]

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