Bye bye EC2, Hello Gandi Hosting!

I have been using EC2 for some time now, for example hosting the Profoss news website, the Profoss newsletter, and other personal tools. But it was kind of expensive for what I used, so I was looking at alternatives, but as I had not time to tackle it, it was left as an idea.

But now my EC2 instance became unavailable. And for those who don't know, an EC2 instance has no persistent storage, meaning that a reboot leaves you with a blank instance. Which makes backup even more important.

As I needed to restore everything from my backups, I decided to go the Gandi Hosting service. They partition their servers in 64 shares, and (currently) you can decide to use between 1 and 32 of them. Ok, one share is not very powerful hardware: 256 MB of RAM (+512 MB of swap), 5 GB of RAID6 disk space reserved for your data (the system is on another disk). Network bandwidth stands at 5 Mbits guaranteed. But one share only costs.... 6€! And you can start small and add shares as you need them.

So I decided to take 1 share, and see how things go. If I need more power, I'll add a share, and I'll pay 12€ a month. But honestly, with the tools running on my share, it could be some time before I take that step.