I’ve been messing around with hosting for what seems like a LONG time – my first domain name was registered in February of 1997, more than ten years ago.

It never gets simpler.

I started out with a shared hosting account with ProWebSites.com (long defunct), for almost $30 per month. Traffic and storage were measured in megabytes, those days, and no one even talked much about “up-time”.

When I started working at Ramsbottoms Computers in Nelson, I took over their “web hosting” department – which involved a bunch of local businesses, hosted off of an overbuilt desktop machine sitting on the desk in the back room. The best thing I did for them was get that server rebuilt into a rack-mounted box, and tucked into colocation in the only data-center in town.

Sometime early in 2000 I put my own server together, in the basement of an office building in Iowa. (It’s still there, actually.) Since then it’s been a succession of colo boxes, self-managed hosting… I’ve even run a couple of data centers.

Last week, the hard-drive started failing in one of my ServerBeach servers.
This, really, was the last straw.

I’ve had billing issues. I’ve had trouble-ticket issues. They won’t return phone calls (although they do reply to email – excessively. Usually I get a blank copy of any email I send to them – 10 minutes before I get an actual reply.) Now I’m getting hardware failures – I’m done. I’m leaving.

I decided it was time for EC2 – until I realized that the hosting services built on it where $500 a month minimum, and the alternative seemed to be a weird set of windows command line tools.

I went whining to Jesse Andrews:

4:52:13 PM JustJosh: do you know the gandi people?
4:52:18 PM JustJosh: can I get an invite?
4:52:57 PM jesse: ahh, that is new
4:53:00 PM jesse: have no invites
4:53:03 PM JustJosh: fucl
4:53:15 PM jesse: ec2 might be better for you
4:53:20 PM jesse: since you need more than a $8 slice
4:53:31 PM JustJosh: yeah
4:54:01 PM JustJosh: but I don’t really have time to figure out ec2 instances
4:54:24 PM jesse: install elasticfox
4:54:31 PM jesse: you can have a new slice in minutes
4:54:41 PM JustJosh: looking into it now
5:16:18 PM JustJosh: help
5:16:24 PM JustJosh: what AMI should I start with?
5:16:27 PM JustJosh: there are a PILE of them

Etc, etc.

Let me start out by saying that ElasticFox ROCKS – James Greenfield took an entirely broken experience, and managed to make it only MOSTLY broken.

But there was one absolutely critical function that elasticfox DIDN’T do – save an AMI image of your running instance, back to S3.

So I added it.

There are a lot of caveats, of course – I’m still hacking wildly. No guarantees on anything but Mac. But seriously, it’s a lot better than the alternative.

Go download it, and try it out.

PS – SpandexFox.com is running on EC2.

PPS – EC2 got elastic storage today – SpandexFox will have support SOON, I promise.