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April 01 2008
Fed up with your hosts?
Amazon are adding new features to their cloud computing services with the aim of taking on the web hosting market
The popularity of this site means here at IR we‘re always interested in getting cheaper hosting. So we pricked up our ears when web site hosting and reliability watchers Netcraft alerted us to some interesting changes at Amazon.
According to Netcraft “Amazon has made a significant and much bolder step into the web hosting arena, extending its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service by introducing Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones.”
The Elastic IP Addresses allow Amazon Web Services users to set up static IP addresses, making it easy to host websites, web services and other online applications using Amazon EC2.
While the Availability Zones feature makes it easy and relatively inexpensive to operate a highly available internet application. Availability Zones are designed to be protected from failures in other Availability Zones, so by spreading an application across several zones, it can be better protected against power failures or network downtime.
While Amazon aren’t making it particularly user friendly for non-techie readers, the upshot of the changes to EC2 according to Netcraft is the new service is ideal for existing owners of dedicated servers who want further scalability or wish to make their sites highly available at a reasonable cost. Adding “With EC2's bandwidth costs significantly undercutting many hosting companies, Amazon's latest move will be sending shock waves throughout the conventional hosting industry. It will be interesting to see how the use of Elastic IP Addresses grow, as high bandwidth websites - or even entire hosting companies - are tempted to migrate to a cheaper alternative.”
Although EC2 maybe cheaper than some hosts there are still a few issues with the Amazon cloud, and the recent crash http://www.internetretailing.net/news/amazon-s3-crash doesn’t help Amazons reliability claims.
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