Howly shmoly, just read the announcement of Amazon’s Free Usage Tier offering an EC2 micro instance free of charge for a whole year! Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well let’s go back a few months and analyze the reason why I left Amazon in favor of Media Temple’s (ve) service: Amazon is way too expensive for a young geek like me, barely having the money to pay rent for my lousy...
Moving Away from the Amazon Cloud
I wrote quite a few posts about Amazon Web Services and I hosted my blog there too for a while, but after some time I decided to switch back to a cheaper hosting provider and leave Amazon for the big projects inside our company. This turned out to be quite tricky. Moving away from the Amazon cloud has some pitfalls you should watch out for. So this post is not only a note to myself about how to...
Amazon Web Services: EC2 in North California
January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new...
Amazon Web Services: Moving to a New Region
I wrote about Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs back in November, where I mentioned some of the upsides of Reserved Instances at Amazon, but haven’t mentioned any downsides, and here we are. Two weeks later Amazon announced the Northern California Region opening. I thought it wouldn’t differ from the Virginia data center, but still decided to give it a shot for a few hours. I...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 & Rejected Email
A few weeks ago I’ve setup my email in the /etc/aliases for user root (and the others) and started to actually read my root email from time to time (I wonder why I never did that before). Anyways, what bugged me straight away is that I had some rejected emails that were not being delivered, yielding the following errors (I removed some numbers): Deferred: 450 4.7.1 : Helo command rejected:...
W3 Total Cache with Amazon S3 and CloudFront
A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in...
Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs
I’ve been with Amazon for quite a long time now and you must have heard that their web hosting services aren’t very cheap. The average total of one instance per month (including EBS, S3 and all the others) was around $120 at the start. That was back in July 2009 when I had no idea about how all this stuff works. With a lot of experimenting I managed to drop my instance per month costs...
Loading jQuery from a CDN in WordPress
This may seem like an easy task to do but is quite tricky in WordPress. Using a CDN these days is very popular, cheap and helps speed up your website taking the load off your web server. I personally love Amazon CloudFront! The tips at Google Code suggest you serve all your static content from different domains, preferably ones without cookies, so CDNs are perfect. All the problem with WordPress...
Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug
Here’s a little video that we’ve seen at Arvind’s and Sreeram’s presentation about speeding up the web at the Google Developer Day 2009 conference in Moscow. Inspiring isn’t it? Arvind and Sreeram talked about a very nice plugin for Firefox (built upon Firebug) which is called Page Speed, developed and maintained by the Googlers. You may read more about the plugin on...
Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront
So, three months later I realized I wasn’t using CloudFront at all! Huh? I took a deeper look at my Amazon Web Services bill last month and found out that I wasn’t even charged for CloudFront! But hey, I delivered all my static content through CloudFront distributions from S3 and I had a subdomain mapped to those distributions and everything was working fine (thought I).. Let’s...