Great, this explains a lot. I prefer the console world more than anything else out there. I should look into the server to replace my current product line hosted at dreamhost. Though dreamhost has some powerful one click installs that save me a bit of time. And they are funny. :D Thanks! Jason
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 7:35 AM, pbreit <pbreitenb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Each "instance" is like an individual web server. You can scale in two ways: > 1) your existing instance can acquire more CPU cycles and RAM or 2) you can > relatively easily add and subtract additional instances (ie, servers). Being > able to grow your instance is nice but if you are running into performance > limitations, you will likely need to consider adding additional servers. The > simplest setup would be two web servers linked to one database server. From > there, you can make it as complex if you want. > However, the best first thing to do is to try an optimize your application. > Look at your queries. See how frequently your are hitting your database > (almost always the bottleneck). Offload your images to a CDN (Amazon S3, > RackSpace CloudFiles, etc). You might be able to get a quick benefit from a > service like CloudFlare. > > EC2 pricing is generally competitive. RackSpace is also a good provider. If > you are in the USA (and possibly elsewhere) you can try out Amazon's > smallest instance for free for 1 year. After that, it's only about $9 per > month. > In any event, be prepared to learn how to operate your own *nix web server > (I prefer Ubuntu 10.04). While it is not as easy as using a hosting > provider's control panel, it can be done by a newbie. Try to keep it simple.
