In the Cloud
Mentioned last time, I only really looked at the "big three" cloud providers. I know there are some others out there, but decided I'd stick with one of the mainstream players.
Firstly, Google AppEngine is easy to rule out: all my sites are on the Microsoft stack, so won't work here.
Secondly, I looked into Windows Azure. I had high hopes, but have to say was pretty disappointed. One of the appealing aspects is not having to deal with the operating system - you simply push up your application and MS will worry about patching the OS. But it's pretty damn expensive - perhaps it would turn out to be comparable with Amazon EC2 (will summarise next), but I'd have hoped it'd be significantly cheaper - at least have a 'low-grade' option for small sites.
I may be wrong, but one annoying aspect seems to be that you pay per running instance (which is the same as in EC2) - so even if that instance isn't used particularly heavily, you pay the same as if it were running constantly at max CPU.
Tie in
However, one thing I definitely wanted to avoid was vendor tie-in as much as possible. My applications are fairly 'traditional' - ASP.NET MVC (various versions), against a SQL Server database. Azure does now have a SQL Server-like database (SQL Azure) although this is more costly than the simple BLOB or Table Storage options. The obvious downside with the BLOB or storage options are that you have to re-code you application to work against those services and moving to an alternative cloud provider would almost certainly mean another code change.
EC2
Thirdly, I looked at Amazon EC2. This seems pretty popular and I can see why. It's a pretty simple (on the face of it) solution. You basically get a virtual machine on the Amazon hardware. You own the OS, and therefore can load whatever you want on to it (licensing still applies of course).
This is quite appealing. The advantage is that you own everything so have full flexibility. But the disadvantage is that you own everything and so have to worry about patching and configuring of IIS, SQL Server, etc…! The classic blessing and a curse.
What sold me was the Micro option (although as I will go into in another post, I moved off this instance and onto the small instance). The Micro option is pretty cheap - not as cheap as a 'traditional' hosting provider perhaps, but still pretty competitive. This option gives you a low powered "machine": 613MB RAM and short bursts of up to two compute units (2 CPUs basically). Plus, there's always the option to easily upgrade to a small instance.
The Micro option is also 64-bit, so can run Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2, which I'd read does (just about perhaps!) run on the limited memory available on Micro.
Next
So I signed up and started moving the first site to EC2. Next up, I'll continue the story of actually moving to "the cloud".
