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...
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:...
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...
Cloud Tips: Automatic Backups to S3
In a previous post about backing up EC2 MySQL to an Amazon S3 bucket we covered dumping MySQL datasets, compressing them and uploading to S3. After a few weeks test-driving the shell script, I came up with a new version that checks, fixes and optimizes all tables before generating the dump. This is pretty important as mysqldump will fail on whatever step would cause an error (data corruption...
FTP Breaking on FEAT (vsftpd on Fedora Core 8)
It’s been a while since I connected to my Amazon EC2 running Fedora Core 8 via FTP and for no reason I tried connecting there today and badaboom! Strange though, it worked fine about a month ago, I was able to upload and download files, but this time I got a little crash. On one version of FileZilla FTP client I received a simple “Unable to connect” error. On a newer version I...
Cloud Tips: Backing Up MySQL on Amazon EC2 to S3
Now that I’m all set up in the Amazon cloud I’m starting to think about backups. Elastic Block Storage (EBS) on Amazon is great and the Snapshots (backups) can be generated with a few clicks from the Management Console, but, for a few reasons I’d like to set up my own backup scripts and here’s why: Amazon EBS snapshots are cool, but there might be a situation where...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 Email & S3 CNAME Issues
So you moved your blog or website (or whatever) to Amazon EC2 and wondering why your e-mail notices have stopped working? Now I know there’s bunch of articles about the EC2 email issues, and most of them state that the letters are getting into the spam boxes or aren’t getting delivered at all, because Amazon’s IP pool has been blacklisted by most e-mail providers. Don’t...
Working With Amazon EC2: Tips & Tricks
It’s been a while now since I’ve been hosting on Amazon Web Services and I’d just like to point out some issues I had and quick ways of solving them. We’re gonna talk about setting up a server that would serve not only you, but your clients too, cause $100/mo is quite expensive, isn’t it? So let’s begin and keep this as straightforward as possible. If you...