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Comment by tlack | Hacker News Reader

We're in between: full-on dedicated servers with SoftLayer for more intense tasks. We like being able to have other people work on the machine without having to drive to a data center in the middle of nowhere, but knowing that we have 100% of the hardware at our disposal (as opposed to virtualized disks and sporadic performance on EC2). It's really not that expensive either and we can still bring new machines online in a couple of hours if necessary.

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I can still manage the server from anywhere in the world via SSH which I have setup -- of course if the Internet goes down at the server's location then all bets are off, but with EC2 do you have the ability to modify the apache configuration files? I need this ability for the web application that I'm developing

Yes, you have full root access to your EC2 instances.

Interesting, will have to look into this

I've always wondered though, is it as easy as copying the disk image on my current physical server and uploading it to Amazon? I would need the same configurations and packages in place and I'm just trying to understand if I would have to remember every configuration I ever made to get me to this point, or if it's as easy as a simple copy & paste

I don't think you can import an image into Amazon.

You will need to start with an EC2 image (AMI) of which there are many both from Amazon and 3rd parties. Some of those AMI's may have close to all you need. I personally started with a bitmami image (http://bitnami.org/stacks). Once you have all your configuration done on that you can create your own personal AMI from it and use it to create additional instances (dev, staging, different customers, etc). That AMI will work for creating different instance sizes (memory/CPU). But I don't think there is a way to export an AMI and use it outside of Amazon.

No I don't think you can directly import an image of your disk, but if you can find an Amazon image (AMI) of the same operating system you are using, you could probably just rsync your /usr/local/, web data, and database directories and get something approximate to what you are doing now. That said I think it would be worthwhile to start from scratch so you can at least have a fresh memory of how your site operates.

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