The pros and cons of migrating from shared hosting to having your website on Amazon S3
I've been learning to trust Amazon S3 a lot more recently. Back in 2008 I had a whole load of important business items fall over because of the famous Amazon S3 outage; notably things like 37Signals Basecamp. Since that point I'd been hesitant about the platform, but is now the time to move over to the cloud?
Historically Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been best reserved for media and other web-assets - meaning your dedicated server can be used to serve the pages while the other HTTP requests go off to wherever you've got those assets hosted. However I recently read that Werner Vogel's (the CTO of Amazon) blog "All Things Distributed" is now exclusively hosted on Amazon S3. Which has made me ponder the benefits of such a solution...
I've recently done some rather exciting work using Amazon S3 for secure media hosting, locking down requests to files based on certain user authentication and whatnot and... shock... found it to be a perfectly scaleable platform. So why not host your entire website in the cloud? I've got some pros and cons.
Pros
1. Downtime should be non-existent
Given the size of the platform and how reliable it has been since that outage that the rare downtime you experience on your conventional shared hosting setup would likely be a thing of the past.
2. Your costs will scale with your traffic, both ways
Amazon S3 charges you on the bandwidth you're using. Your current host will charge you for a package (a nominated amount of bandwidth, a nominated amount of storage). Traditionally if you exceed these limits you need to brace yourself for some fees (hence the roulette of becoming popular overnight or being slashdotted). However, with Amazon you're charged per unit used on both storage and bandwidth meaning a quiet month will result in a low bill, whereas a busy month will involve a proportionally more expensive bill. All on a linear pricing model.
3. No worries of your host going feral or out of business
If Amazon were going to go out of business, it'd be on all the news channels. However, if SliceHost (or anyone for that matter) were struggling with their overheads, it could happen quite quickly.
Cons
1. Currently, no support for dynamic scripting
A term I despise but definitely a valid concern. It doesn't appear as if you can run a PHP website on S3 just yet (although, expect it). Amazon only recently announced the ability to easily host a static website on S3 so it's obviously an area they're looking at expanding into.
2. Friendly control panels? Probably not...
If you're a fairly traditional shared-host user then you'll be spoiled by the friendliness (or at least functionality) of the control panels supplied to you. The one on Dreamhost is what I'm used to and it offers one-click installs for various applications, easy FTP user creation, SSH user creation, PHPMyAdmin (which is utter filth, but so handy) amongst a load of other things. The reason I don't have a dedicated box is because I'm not confident enough at the gritty side of server administration. I can handle basic tasks but I can't configure Apache blindfolded nor set up my own backup system, so it's best I have trained professionals handle that for me.
So we can't run PHP websites on S3 just yet, but it's looking like that day is getting closer. The ability to host in the cloud already exists but is very much like an instanced dedicated box; something I'm not skilled enough to administer myself. However, the second that hosting in the cloud (on somewhere as huge and reputable as Amazon) becomes suitable for a developer (rather than a sys-ad) I'll be all over it. The benefits comfortably outweigh the cons.
Next, what to consider before hosting in the cloud.
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