I have obviously heard all the hype of the cloud infrastructures. Never had a need to jump in and try it though. I have been happy with my server machine that happily runs 24/7 using ubuntu. I have had it running over a full year without having to restart that machine even once. I made the mistake of looking at performance of the server. Not a good idea. I quickly realized that some of the websites I was hosting need to be on a more production like server. Now where do I turn? Maybe the cloud was my answer?

I really enjoy controlling the server so I immediately ruled out Google’s App cloud. It also ruled out the old $7 dollars/month domain hosting sites. Though some do allow ssh access they do not allow you to do upgrades on the server. I am down to only a few select. There may be others out there but it came down to Slicehost and Amazon EC2. Basically, since Amazon had the free year and I have heard so many good things about it. It ended up being a easy choice. The only probably is how much I will pay after the free year is up. I might end up going back to my old server if the cost is too high. Time will tell 🙂

I personally went with the Ubuntu Maverick x64 bit install. Here is the details – https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EC2StartersGuide

Here is some help for connecting with PuTTY for the first time:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonEC2/gsg/2007-01-19/putty.html