What Amazon EC2 AMI do you recommend?

Rails
1

I’m looking at using EC2 for hosting deploying my Rails site. The
reasons for the decision are these: I want something that will work
for 10 users, but with capacity to expand to 10,000,000 if needed.
EC2 starts at $15/month (before bandwidth) which seems reasonable even
for a site in its infancy. And the costs seem to scale up well, along
with the capacity. There isn’t the huge step up from $10 to $200 that
most other options seem to have (when you outgrow shared and go
dedicated).

My basic needs are as follows:

  • Ruby on Rails
  • MySQL
  • PHP (for some legacy stuff), with ImageMagick.

I’m not totally new to managing servers, but I guess would rather do
as little as I need to (better to spend my time coding).

With those requirements in mind, does anyone have a good AMI they
would recommend with EC2?

http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/ seems good but is now unmaintained,
and I’m not sure if it included my PHP requirement.

Second question: I’m already using S3 for data storage. So how does
the whole EC2 thing work with the database? I’m guessing all your
database files are stored in the EC2 instance? Are these reliable
enough? What is the best practice? Daily backups to S3 or something?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,
Will

2

William D. wrote in post #955353:

I’m looking at using EC2 for hosting deploying my Rails site. The
reasons for the decision are these: I want something that will work
for 10 users, but with capacity to expand to 10,000,000 if needed.
EC2 starts at $15/month (before bandwidth) which seems reasonable even
for a site in its infancy. And the costs seem to scale up well, along
with the capacity. There isn’t the huge step up from $10 to $200 that
most other options seem to have (when you outgrow shared and go
dedicated).

My basic needs are as follows:

  • Ruby on Rails
  • MySQL
  • PHP (for some legacy stuff), with ImageMagick.

I’m not totally new to managing servers, but I guess would rather do
as little as I need to (better to spend my time coding).

With those requirements in mind, does anyone have a good AMI they
would recommend with EC2?

Use Heroku. It’s the easiest solution for deploying Rails in the cloud.
(It doesn’t do PHP, but you may want to host that separately anyway.)

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]