Magento hosting on Amazon S3 - any thoughts?

[WhiskyFive]

Has anyone had a go with hosting Magento on the Amazon cloud?

There are some pre-made instances that you can test with.

Personally, I think it sounds great...but I am a bit worried that the performance wouldn't be comparable to having your own dedicated box.

We have a UK website and plan to launch a US one....already half our traffic comes from the US, so we liked the idea of having an instance in the US and one in the UK - and then adding new server instances as demand increased...and dropping them when it fell (e.g. before a big PR splash or in the run-up to Christmas).

Does anyone have any insights as to performance or availability? What are the downsides in hosting on Amazon?

[EastCoastInteractive]

The main downside to using EC2 (S3 is the storeage service, you couldn't run magento off that as it is purely a static file service) is data persistence and the additional complexity in setting up.

When an EC2 instance is switched off, all recent data is lost unless you do a snapshot, use an elastic block store or backup data periodically to an external store such as s3.

From a performance perspective you get plenty memory (the smallest EC2 instance has 1.7gig memory) which should be plenty to have both sufficient apache child processes for a reasonable level of traffic and a good amount of mysql and accelerator cache if you use these tweaks (you should in the case of magento), and you can of course change to higher level instances if required (for a higher cost).

As with all virtualised solutions, disk i/o is shared so there's a potential bottleneck there if you have high traffic.

[WhiskyFive]

Thanks - we'll give it a miss then :-)

[edmondscommerce]

I think its an awesome idea and well worth playing with before you dismiss it

[stugster]

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