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Tuesday 13 May 2008

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello!

Thanks for your confidence in Gandi! We have just launched the service in its final version, and we have made some improvements since your last post: we are using RAID 60 disks under SAS, and have added many more distributions to our offer!

Also, with our GandiFlex offer, you can schedule the change in the power of your server in advance, for periods as short as one hour.

If you'd like to discuss this in more detail, I'll be at the bar!
http://www.gandibar.net/post/2008/10/02/The-Cloud-Infrastructure-is-finally-concrete

Ryan,
Gandi SAS

Ludo said...

Hi !

Did you have any numbers on the CPU power available on Gandi Hosting ?
I have run unixbench on EC2, you'll find my numbers here:

http://ldrolez.free.fr/blog/?category=Hardware&post=gandi-hosting-aws-ec2

Ludo.