> 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...
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.
The documentation I was following made no mention of this at all.
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.