Would you be interested in a blog post about it? I'm a sysadmin/devops with 12 years in, and build stuff like this on a daily basis. I wouldn't mind sharing how the sausage is made.
And thanks for the reference to Digital Ocean. Never heard of them before. Seems great, might try using them :)
> Do your VPSs already have things installed or a GUI?
Nope. I prefer straight-up Arch linux. ssh in and go from there.
To add some concrete-ness to the mix, I was installing ejabberd. When it came time to ping the server... no response. I did the exact same steps on my Digital Ocean VPS and everything went fine. I had done whatever commands EC2 expects to open the right ports...
A raw EC2 instance is identical to your average VPS offering. You don't have to use all the extra alphabet soup of ELB, SQS, SNS, SES, etc.
> When it came time to ping the server... no response.
What were your security group settings? ICMP (ping, traceroute, etc.) are blocked by default, you have to enable them.
See, you say that, but then you later say
> What were your security group settings?
I dunno, man, I just want a server. Every other VPS provider works, and I can set up my own iptables etc.
I'm not saying EC2 is _bad_, as I'm sure things being extra mega locked down by default is good overall. But I don't think it's fair to say that EC2 is the same as a VPS.
EC2 fits every definition of VPS I've ever seen.
Furthermore, I don't feel very comfy when doing 'sysadmin via Google,' who knows what stuff I'm screwing up?
I had never used Digital Ocean before. But getting going with them was the exact same as my previous Linode, Rackspace Cloud, prgmr.com, and every other VPS provider I have tried. I don't need to install special command line tools, or set up security groups, or generate .pems... I ask for a server, they send me an email with a password, I log in, change it, and set up my ssh prefs. Super easy, using the same stuff I use everywhere else.
The documentation I was following made no mention of this at all.
I'm a large user of AWS but, in general, I never feel like I'm in a true VPS. My last experience:
Out of the sudden one of our EC2 instances could not connect to another, causing our HA solution to spun dozens of instances and eventually crash too. It was clear to me that the dest machine was behind some firewall, we went to the security group, the machine was supposed to accept any connection, from any port, any host. The instance itself had no active firewall.
Out of desperation I added the very own security group to itself. It worked for a few hours, then stopped again, I removed, it came back to work and still working (8+ months now)
This is only one of various mysterious events I've seen happening on AWS.
For me it that restarting an EC2 instance deletes all the local storage. I have had good success just getting a big ass VPS, and running the database locally, and pushing text backups to S3. It is trivial to manage, and in the real world, downtime is more likely to be caused by configuration wonkiness than hardware failures.
You also have to have a huge amount of traffic to overwhelm a 24core / 96GB ram server. Why not put off the managing the complexity until you really are doing 10M page views per day?
The thing is that for whatever reason, data wasn't being written to the EBS (the virtual hard disks for use with EC2 instances) and was instead being written to the "ephemeral storage", a really big local data store that every EC2 instance has that is basically a `/tmp` directory. If the server restarts, everything in the ephemeral storage is destroyed.
Local storage on a $5 Digital Ocean plan will do 2000 IOPS, where as that would cost $200/month with Amazon Provisioned IOPS. I know it is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is worth thinking about. Running a database on a local SSD is a good option for many people, and it is not an option that Amazon offers.