Elastic Web Hosting and Amazon ec2
April 24th, 2007
What is elastic webhosting?
Elastic web hosting in its simplest terms is a hosting account where resources can be rapidly expanded to meet demand. Still very much a new technology its use is gradually beginning to pick up as more and more people discover the limitations of fixed resource hosting. On a typical fixed hosting account you’re allocated a fixed amount of resources and the amount you pay is based on the size of those resources. This model means that in order to keep your site running smoothly you need to be able to accurately predict the maximum amount of load that the server will be subjected to. This can be a nightmare for small startup companies who may find it hard to judge how quickly their service will grow. With fixed resource hosting there are two options:
1. Buy a huge amount of resources initially so that should your website take off or receive unusually traffic spikes you won’t have to worry about migrating to a new server. This is a very costly solution and is often not viable for small startups.
2. Buy a limited amount of resources initially and hope that you will have time to migrate the site to a new server should the website traffic increase. More cost effective but what happens if you your traffic increases rapidly over a number of days. The server gets swamped, there is no time to migrate and you’re facing downtime.
But now there is a third option - Elastic hosting
With elastic hosting you can allocate additional resources in minutes should you server recieve an exceptional amount of traffic. Take for example Digg. Many smaller sites that get on the first page fall over because they do not have the resources to handle the huge amount of traffic that arrives over a period of 3-4 hours. In such a short space of time there is no chance of migrating the site to a new server and updating the name severs accordingly. This results in a loss of vistors and possibly missing out on potential revenue. Elastic hosting solves this. Not only can you allocate additional resources very quickly but more importantly it is often possible to automate the process. This is how it works.
1. A background process monitors resources on your server, it checks free memory, bandwidth, processing speed and disk space. More complex setups may also detect the rate of visitors to the site.
2. A sudden spike of traffic to the site causes the available memory to drop below a suitable level. The background process detects this drop and spawns another identical server and manages traffic with a load balancer.
3. The spike of traffic dies and the free memory on the server rises to an acceptable level. The background process recognizes this and terminates the additional resource.
You only pay for the amount of resources used. So instead of paying for a large amount of resources all the time you only pay for the additional resources when they are required.
Elastic Hosting Providers
Currently the most advanced elastic hosting package appears to be from Amazon in the form of their Amazon EC2 (elastic computing cloud) service. This service works in conjunction with their S3 image hosting service and data transfer between the services is completely free. Which means your bandwidth costs will be considerably lower than on a standard webhost. The only bandwidth you pay for is for data transfered outside of the amazon network. I’m currently testing this service out and will report back with my findings within a month or two.
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Sounds like someone is responding to consumer demand and variable market changes. I, too, am looking at my hosting options and am looking forward to your follow up comments. Cost will be a factor, but that sure beats downtime.