Many will know that I need to upgrade from the current shared webhosting...it is overdue!

A dedicated server would, of course, be ideal but I'm not sure I can justify the cost - I'm not totally convinced that I can't either! Plus, there is the server admin that I certainly don't have the time for or the skills for. The latter is solvable but not the time issue in the short-term.

So, I thought about an AWS EC2 instance for all our webs services. This seems an ideal solution for a number of reasons:

  1. Once setup, take an image to restore if I mess things up
  2. Whatever version of Perl we want, we can install
  3. For testing, we take an image of production, spin up another EC2 instance and use that for testing/developing thus avoiding having a test setup and potential security holes
  4. No need to guess about the specs we need - AWS automagically scales as needed
  5. If one part of the business grows significantly, its easy to spin up another EC2 instance just for that
  6. Not as much server admin needed as a dedicated server but still some

In some ways this seems too good to be true...
Is this a plan worth looking further into or have a overlooked a flaw somewhere?

We have databases of significant size - the biggest has 138 tables but only takes up 285Mb storage space. Plus we use Perl for everything! The shared hosting runs Apache but I have nothing to do with that other than some simple additions to the webroot .htaccess file.

In reply to AWS EC2 and Perl by Bod

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