Hi Mark!


You can get 2 Virtual Private Servers on AWS EC2 for *free* for the first
year.  After that their pricing is STILL alot cheaper than what you were
paying!   But you will have to investigate that by setting up mockup
billing as you build your systems and evaluate your needs.  You have a
whole year.

Their free tier includes a good lot of startup resources:

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

I personally LOVE EC2 and have had a lot of fun deploying their images (and
mine) in the "cloud".

While you really need nothing but Amazon's own management tools to do most
anything you might want, the real power of the EC2 and S3 Amazon services
is the capacity to build up duplicate images and deploy, manage, and secure
the servers using automation tools.  Gone are the days when an army of
server monkeys typed for days managing all the little things on servers.

Of course, AWS has already integrated OPWorks into their product, and it's
very powerful:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/gettingstarted-simple-app.html

However, there's a development API that has allowed others to seamlessly
integrate their application to EC2/S3 AWS.   CHEF, Puppet, Cobbler and many
other customized deployment scripts  and tools have been developed in in
ruby, python, and perl (github) and J2EE.

Ansible:  http://docs.ansible.com/intro_dynamic_inventory.html
Cobbler:  https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=14590
Puppet:  http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/ec2
Chef:  http://learn.getchef.com/legacy/starter-use-cases/multi-node-ec2/

Of course everyone has to get into the game, so we see competing deployment
tools newly available like *Juju* <https://juju.ubuntu.com/>, the open
source service orchestration management tool developed by Canonical, the
company already famous for its Linux-based operating system Ubuntu. What’s
great in Juju is that it automates the daily tasks that your infrastructure
requires, and it allows you to focus on what really matters to you. All
this is made possible by what are called “Charms” in the Juju jargon. A
*Charm* is a collection of YAML configuration files and a selection of
“hooks”, which are naming conventions that perform several operations like
install software, start/stop a service, manage relationships with other
Charms, and more. Since Charms can be shared among different systems, a
Charm store is available to share and download them.


So, while I love linode, libvirt and KVMs, I would opt for a better
solution managing your own server set on AWS.

Feel free to email me offline for more info or questions.




On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 5:23 PM, Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz>
wrote:

> I have been using linode for many years now. One of my linodes died after
> a reboot, and their tech support could not figure out what was wrong. So,
> the suggestion was use one of the weekly backups that I have been paying
> for. Well, the backup does not work - boots into a kernel panic. Tech
> support now says that I should start over with a new linode and redeploy
> the data from my personal backups, and not theirs.
>
> Needless to say, I am looking for another Linux virtual hosting company. I
> have modest needs. A couple of low volume web sites in Java/MySQL and
> Python - I need more RAM and disk space than high bandwidth. Linode is
> $20/month for 2 GB RAM, 48GB disk.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark
>
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