Alex Pooley's Blog

Why don't you subscribe to my blog while you're here? I'm a freelance web developer and I blog about Ruby, Rails, and business online.

Go ahead and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Update: It looks like EC2 data persistence worked a little different to the way I understood it. Apparently you can reboot instances and not lose anything, but you will lose everything if you terminate the instance. Fair enough. But, the concern then appears to be that if your box crashes, you can’t reboot and can only terminate or possibly get an admin to manually reboot the box. There’s a nice thread here if you’re interested.

There is clearly a lot of interest in using S3 as a web hosting service, and particularly in combination with EC2. Unfortunately it doesn’t work yet, and here’s why…

S3 is Amazon’s simple storage service which is a geographically distributed storage grid. The nice thing about this service is that it’s inexpensive (pay per use), fault tolerant, and provides great performance. The huge problem with this service as a web host is that it really is very simple. Not simple to use however, it’s complicated, but simple as in stupid. Why? Well, you don’t have access to things you take for granted with web hosting like default index files, mod_rewrite, auto compression for gzip/deflate requests.

I was using S3 for serving my static assets. I decided to switch to a simple shared host because I had to serve a 220K javascript asset uncompressed, compared to the 56K compressed equivalent.

The pro S3 web hosters at this point chime in with, “just stick it behind a web server, EC2 *wink* *wink*, and perform redirects”.

OK, so take the hint and stick is behind EC2, now you’re paying a minimum of $72 a month and it’s no longer an inexpensive service. You also need to start compiling Linux images for EC2 - but all I want to do is push static assets like HTML, CSS, JS, and Images! Ignore the hint to throw S3 behind EC2 and throw it behind a web server elsewhere, but there goes your fault tolerance advantage!

So why not just ignore S3 and simply use EC2 for your web hosting needs? Well, EC2 requires a Linux image - a bit complicated for my time constrained mind at the moment, and worst of all, EC2 does not provide persistent storage because that’s what S3 is for! If your EC2 crashes, or you bring it down for some reason then all the data stored on the box is gone (really, it’s in the FAQ).

S3 and EC2 are a couple of really interesting products. I really like the way Amazon is supplying Internet infrastructure. S3 and EC2 are just not built for web hosting right now. The uses I’m hearing for S3 and EC2 is mostly for testing environments, or as an external backup system. I’m sure other services will build on what’s already there and a great hosting platform will be created, but for now things just don’t fit right, so no thanks.

I’ve overhauled the interface (see image) by providing access to all your chat pages in the side bar. Each page has a context menu to join/leave etc, and if you are in one page and someone posts in another page then the page title will turn red to indicate an unread post. Note that this hasn’t been deployed in to production yet, Sorry!

I have a big week planned. There’s a few enhancements to make to ScribbleHere like adding an invitation system. I’m also going to drop the msgpad server in to a symmetrical two node cluster that will sit behind a proxy/load balancer/database/web server. All the web assets will sit behind Amazon’s S3 grid providing unmatched cost:performance.

ScribbleHere got of off to a quick start thanks to Yahoo’s gallery publicity. I was curious to see what effect this would have on the site, and what would happen once I was dropped from the front page. I was only on the front page for a couple of days, but the data/feedback was very helpful. Here’s a bunch of graphs for your perusal.

So far I’m pretty happy. I’ve noticed a few important things:

1. People are pretty unimpressed with the simplicity of the site. It seems like “customers” are pretty unforgiving ;)
2. The system isn’t getting any real use yet. I think this is more an indication of the people flowing through the site so far coming mainly from Yahoo! Gallery.
3. Users want to play with the thing. Internet usage can fall in to three categories: communication, information, entertainment. This tool is a communication tool, but I think people passing through the site are after entertainment. I will need to hedge my bets a bit better.
4. The site doesn’t lend itself to exploration. The front page is very much “all or nothing”, in other words, “if you don’t have a use for this, then move along”. I’ll sort this out.
5. People are shy! I’ve had a few users flow through from blog comments I’ve left asking comment readers to speak to me about my comments - but no one wants to chat. I assure you, the Internet is much more fun when it’s read/write! Despite the “interactive” nature of the Internet, I still think there is very much a “watching TV” type of mind set out there.

One thing that is very exciting to me is how information is revealed bits at a time. I carry the philosophy that “I know I don’t know everything”, and I am always looking for that stuff that I know I don’t know. Unfortunately interpolation can only take me so far. The rest is very much hit or miss :) Anyway, I’m off to roll the dice…