FOSS4G'13

The working site for the conference committee of FOSS4G 2013

Upgrading amazon instance

Posted by Jo Cook on May 3, 2013

Hi All,

As discussed in the meeting, there are a few options for upgrading our amazon instance. 

Basically, what we've done up to now is reserve 1 year of a small instance, which meant an upfront cost of $160 and then monthly costs of approx $35. We reserved that in November, so it runs for another 6 months.

If we upgrade to a medium instance, we have just over 4 months to run it for. Monthly costs for a medium instance are approx $95 dollars if you don't reserve an instance, or there are two options for reserving instances: medium usage at $277 upfront and $40 a month, or light usage at $122 upfront and $62 a month.

We might be able to sell back the unused portions of our reserved instances- but I don't know anyone with experience of this so I don't know how much we'd make back. So, assuming we can't do that, then the medium instance costs come in at roughly the same for non-reserved as they do for a light usage reservation, eg approx  $370-380 for the remainder of the time, or just under £250.

A further option is to move to a standard web host, but to my mind that exposes us to more security issues and gives us less control and freedom with the software we install. It is cheaper though!

I think I can upgrade the instance with minimal downtime- I just shut it down, upgrade, and then switch it back on. Switching to a new host would take longer as we'd have to set everything up, transfer all the files, and then re-point the URL to the new IP.

I'd be happiest going for the medium instance with a year's reservation, then look at selling back the unused portions of both our old small instance and new medium instance (to appease the Northern skinflint in me).

Thoughts? Happy to push the button today if we all agree.

Jo

Comments

Steven Feldman on May 3, 2013:

push da button

Jo Cook on May 7, 2013:

Done, with the barest minimum of downtime on Friday afternoon. It does seem faster, so let's hope it's more stable too.

Jo

Barry Rowlingson on May 7, 2013:

Looking at the apache logs, I've noticed there's quite a few hits from image hot-linking of the logo from slashgeo and postgis.net.  I don't think this is causing a load problem but I do wonder if they'd be better off hosting the image somewhere themselves. Glad they trust us not to change it to something else though...