Posted by Michael Marr

Cloud computing has become the standard form of deploying large-scale web applications. Recently, I was asked about a servicing a start-up web service that projects itself having the type of user base and bandwidth that only a Cloud could properly serve. The issue at hand is scalability: should the site start with a minimal Cloud configuration so that it is easily scalable as growth occurs, or should it stick with/start with a virtual dedicated or regular dedicated server and move to the cloud when needed?

Assuming the characteristics of your project require that you have complete control of the configuration and deployment of your server, you can easily rule out extremely cheap standard web hosting solutions. Thus, we end up in the virtual dedicated or dedicated server realm. When pricing these options, the standard price range is around $50 per month for a virtual server (VPS). Dedicated servers can be found for around $50 per month, but usually you are going to want to upgrade to a decent package, and thus these servers average around $75 per month for the type of server you’ll want to start with. These estimates were obtained from the prices available on over ten hosting companies.

When creating an Amazon EC2 cloud instance, we can utilize the reduced pricing of a reserved instance. A reserved instance is instance that you intend to keep up for a high percentage of the time. Since this will be our only web server, we will want it up 100% of the time, and thus should take advantage of the reduced pricing of a reserved instance. On a small scale server (comparable to the VPS and dedicated servers priced above), we end up paying a $227.50 setup fee and $21.96 per month for our server. This averages out to $40.92 per month, and is clearly cheaper than the VPS and dedicated server options. What we gain with this option, however, is instant and easy scalability. Realistically, we won’t be switching our configuration from this minimal server to a fully scaled cloud overnight. However, we will be able to scale up our server as needed. We can also do something that we can not do with a VPS or dedicated server: on-demand load balancing. We can easily configure our EC2 cloud to add instances as needed, only getting charged when those instances are in use. When they aren’t needed, they shutdown and the meter stops running.

If you’re looking to deploy a project that has the potential of getting very large in the foreseeable future, deploying your environment in a cloud from the start seems like a viable and fiscally responsible option.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 10:14 am and is filed under Network. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Michael Marr is a IT staff Writer for WebProNews.