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| Server as a Service |
| Columns - Trends |
| Written by Erik Westermann |
| Monday, 23 February 2009 17:18 |
|
The hosting options for Windows Server fall into two broad types: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Find out about hosting in the cloud using Amazon's AWS. The hosting options for Windows Server fall into two broad types: shared hosting and dedicated hosting. The Shared and Dedicated hosting models are really at the extreme ends of a narrow spectrum of choices. In middle of the spectrum is self-hosting. In the self-hosting model, users host their own Windows server (often in their home or office) and, through some innovative techniques, make their Windows server available to others on the Internet. Self-hosting is useful in a very narrow range of functionality since Internet Service Providers (ISPs) often limit traffic that’s destined for the Internet (upload traffic) – this outbound traffic is important to a server since it needs to send its users its output (web pages, query results, etc). People that self-host servers also have to contend with a variety of security concerns, making this type of hosting attractive to a relatively small number of people. The tradeoff between price and functionality is apparent in Shared and Dedicated hosting. In shared hosting, the monthly costs are often very low but functionality is limited hosting web sites. In dedicated hosting, monthly costs are significant (around ten times the price of shared hosting), with a high degree of functionality since you get complete control over your own server. There’s now a new choice – pay-as-you-go computing using Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2). AWS EC2 offers a pay-as-you-go model that makes it possible to deploy one server, or many, offers very reliable and flexible storage and metered bandwidth. EC2 was available only for  Linux hosts; however, Amazon recently (since approximately October 2008) started to offer Windows 2003 hosts, making EC2 available to a broader range of customers.The pricing model is straight-forward: you pay on an hourly basis to have in instance of Windows running. Your instance uses bandwidth (inbound and outbound traffic) which you pay for on a per Gigabyte basis, and your Windows instance is likely to need disk space, for which you also pay on a per Gigabyte basis. The base cost (that is, the cost of just running a Windows instance without bandwidth or storage) per month is comparable with a less expensive dedicated hosting plan. The key difference is that there’s no setup fee, no monthly fee and you pay only for what you use, for as long as you use it. For example, when you terminate your instance of Windows, you don’t incur any use, therefore, you don’t pay for the time that your server is off. Storage and Bandwidth are also very affordable. Storage (referred to as Amazon Simple Storage Service – S3) is very inexpensive – just cents per Gigabyte you use per month. If you use storage for less than a month, you get billed less. Bandwidth is also inexpensive – inbound and outbound traffic is billed separately. Assuming that my server uses the same amount of inbound and outbound traffic that I do at home, bandwidth with EC2 costs about 20% of my monthly Internet connection’s fee (assuming a 50/50 split between inbound and outbound traffic). The key difference with EC2’s storage service (S3) and bandwidth fee is that you pay only for what you use and get billed at a very granular level. You can get a Windows 2003 Server running in less than 15 minutes. When the server is deployed, you get 1.7Gb of memory, a 1Ghz Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor, and Windows 2003 with about 160Gb of disk space (you don’t have to pay a licensing fee since it is built into the instance’s hourly fee). The EC2 model separates computing (CPU cycles) – EC2 - and storage (S3) by offering them as two distinct services. As a result, the 160Gb of disk space you get with your instance is transient – meaning that you should consider the space on the system’s C: drive as temporary storage that get’s initialized each time you turn off your instance. You add storage to your Windows instance by creating a new volume and attaching it as a new drive letter in Windows. You can add or remove storage as you like, you can change your instance to a High CPU instance simply by changing a configuration option and starting an instance of Windows, and backup capability is fast and integrated with the storage service. You can manage Amazon EC2 and S3 in a variety of ways: direct calls to web services, command line tools, a FireFox add-in, or a web-based console. All four means of managing EC2 are roughly equivalent, although the web services provide the highest degree of flexibility. Amazon S3 is easy to manage using a third party FireFox extension called S3Fox, or Amazon’s S3 web services. Next time: highlights and directions for running Windows Server 2003 on EC2 with an S3 volume, and plenty of management tips to help you backup your instance and new volume.
“Amazon Web Services, the “Powered by Amazon Web Services” logo, [and name any other AWS Marks used in such materials] are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.” |
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