GQAdonis.com now in the cloud

As of today, my personal and professional blog site fully resides in the Amazon Cloud. I am now using Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) to store my blog data and an instance of Windows 2003 Server running in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to provide a web server. This great post written on the CloudBzz blog describes what I consider to be the future of database deployment and application hosting. This article compares Amazon RDS to Microsoft’s upcoming SQL Azure offering, which provides SQL Server databases in the “cloud.”

Immediate Benefits

I have already observed several immediate benefits to hosting my blog in the cloud and leveraging RDS:

• My blog loads a LOT faster. Amazon’s servers have lots of bandwidth available to them, and communication between my virtual server instance and my MySQL RDS instance is speedy.
• I can pay for what I use as I go. I also have lots of options for configuring, scaling up, and rearranging instances to suit changing needs with minimal impact.
• Creating the initial web server instance was easily done using Amazon’s AWS Console.
• The database instances are very secure and comply with the strictest of application partitioning/security standards. Direct access to database servers can be restricted at any level.

Costs

I expect my database instance to cost around $80 per month while I actually don’t have a clear sense yet of what the web server instance will cost, since it is based on a combination of processing power utilized, bandwidth in and out of the Amazon network to that box, and my storage needs. My early estimates seem to indicate that I will easily beat the $400+ per month I was spending hosting servers in a typical ISP shared hosting environment.