Thursday, April 2, 2009  

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a long-time customer. At one point, he looked at me straight and said, "So, I have to ask. Are all these sites just hosted on a server in your basement?" Of course the answer is no, but it makes a great lead into a post about EditMe's recent hosting move.

If you happened to read How Secure is EditMe? back in September, you read that EditMe sites are served up from a collection of leased servers at The Planet, a world class data center and a top notch company. EditMe has been with The Planet since 2004. During five years with them, EditMe did not experience a single significant service outage due to problems on their end. That's saying a hell of a lot, if you have any experience with hosting companies.

Over the past few months, all EditMe services have been moved to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform. This project is now complete, and I'm happy to report that Amazon has exceeded my highest expectations. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain what it means to EditMe customers and why the change was made.

Why Move?

First, this decision had nothing to do with any failing on the part of The Planet. They are a strong company with great customer service, competitive prices and stellar reliability. Unfortunately for the industry, it's really hard to find all three of those qualities in one hosting company.

Second, this was not a cost-saving measure. EditMe's infrastructure costs haven't changed significantly with this move. Though Amazon is slightly less expensive, the difference doesn't come close to justifying the effort involved in the move.

I can sum up the reasoning behind the move in one word: flexibility.

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon's EC2 service (which stands for Elastic Compute Cloud) is a fully automated and programmable VPS (virtual private server) hosting service with utility pricing. Let's break that down:

• Fully automated and programmable. This means that "servers" can be created, modified and destroyed via API calls. If I need to add a server (or ten servers), I click a button in a web interface and my servers are ready for use in just a few minutes. With traditional dedicated hosting, this requires placing an order and waiting for a physical server to be deployed, which can take hours or days.  
• VPS (virtual private server). This means that the servers in EC2 aren't physical servers. A single physical server (they're really big) hosts multiple virtual private servers. Physical server resources are distributed in such a way that the VPS provides the same kind of performance that a physical server of similar configuration would provide. More importantly, if the physical server experiences a hardware failure, the VPS can easily be moved to a different physical server, and this can happen in minutes. With traditional dedicated servers, a hardware failure means lengthy down-time while the problem is fixed or a new server is deployed in its place. 
• Utility pricing. This doesn't mean cheap, it means incremental. Amazon bills for resources by the hour. So I can bring up a replica of a server, do some testing on it, and destroy it when I'm done. If that takes me three hours, I only pay for three hours. Traditional dedicated hosting typically charges a minimum of one month, and doing this in three hours would be impossible any way.

What does this mean for EditMe customers?

Most customers are probably unaware there was any change at all. There hasn't and won't be any noticeable difference from our customers' prospective. All it means is that EditMe is able to respond more quickly to problems, able to scale better and faster, and able to test more thoroughly than before.

If you have any questions about this move that weren't addressed here, ask away. I'd be happy to answer them.