People keep finding my posts regarding Amazon's EC2 service and usually the same questions arise: "How much does it cost? What's the performance?"

Here's some notes regarding our usage of EC2. We ran a webserver there for about half a year, stopping the usage two months ago because we got new servers here in Romania and managing them is much easier.
We ran Debian stable and performance was very good. We hosted a couple of Drupal websites which killed our old, one cpu and 1 gig of ram server, and the load never went high.

The biggest issue we had was the fact that once you started a machine, the new data created on it was not saved. So we had to backup our stuff every night. In fact, we were paranoid so we backed databases, website code but also a new snapshot of the running image every night.

Also, we had two downtimes of about three hours while we were using it.

Usually, in a month, we had:

• 43 gigs of traffic
• 7.5 gigs of data on S3
• 741 box usages (which translates to one EC2 instance running all the time)

Total cost: 84 $ without taxes.

Hope this helps people looking to run a webserver on EC2. Also, our sysadmin Gremlin wrote his experiences on Elastic8.com.