By David Hamilton, theWHIR.com
October 23, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Having officially exited its beta period, Amazon's (www.aws.amazon.com) Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), has entered development again, releaseing the first public beta of EC2 running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server.
According to Amazon's Thursday announcement, originally launched in beta in August of 2006, EC2 is now a fully developed product, offering customers a service level agreement. Also, Amazon now offers customers Windows Server and SQL Server with all of the performance, reliability and scalability benefits of the traditionally Linux-based Amazon EC2, making it an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites and other Windows-based applications.
"When we launched Amazon EC2 over two years ago, the idea of accessing computing power over the web was still a novel idea," Amazon EC2 general manager Peter De Santis said in a statement. "We've listened closely to our customers for the past two years and worked backward from their requirements, adding important new features such as those we are announcing today - Windows support and a service level agreement."
The pricing for Windows-based EC2 is based on a pay-as-you-go model starting at $0.125 per hour of computing with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees.
Amazon has also released plans for new EC2 features to come in 2009 including: load balancing across multiple EC2 compute instances; auto-scaling of compute capacity usage based on application requirements; monitoring features that provide operational metrics and better visibility into usage of the Amazon cloud; and a management console to provide a simple, point-and-click Web interface for managing and accessing cloud resources.
"I think it is important to note that load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring will each be true web services, with complete APIs for provisioning, control, and status checking," wrote developer evangelist Jeff Barr on the Amazon Web Services blog. "We'll be working with a number of management tool vendors and developers to make sure that their products will support these new services on a timely basis."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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