I’m pretty intrigued about the possibilities that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has to offer. Just reading through the documentation, it seems that there are plenty of advantages to using this architecture when it comes to looking for a reliable, cost effective and scalable web hosting package.
No longer do you need to be tied into a fixed term, with a predetermined cost and without the ability to change your server configuration. This option gives you far more freedom and control over your resources and you are able to tailor your server to your needs and only pay for what you use.
The major downside to this solution in my opinion, is that it requires a fair amount of technical know-how to administer. Because it makes use of a web service API, anyone who is configuring it needs to be confortable with making calls to the API. I assume that it is targeted at customers who are developing fairly large-scale applications.
Traditional hosting companies - and I have far too much experience of this (especially lately) - have been getting away with providing too little for too much. Hopefully the game is up for them and we’ll see a knock-on effect that benefits us all.
