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.

1. It doesn’t work in Amazon.ca, or Amazon.co.uk
2. Can I control what product condition (Used/New) or Vendor (Amazon/Others) it watches?

While the second one is proving a little difficult, I’m happy to announce that the new version of BuyLater has full support for Canada and the UK! If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should. And if you’re an extension developer yourself, feel free to grab the source code from github.com and have a look.

A big thank you to everyone who sent in a bug report – if you keep ‘em comin, I’ll keep fixin them. Other planned enhancements for the next version include:

1. Product condition and vendors (as mentioned above)
2. Fine-grained notification controls (including direct, non-twitter SMS and IM delivery)
3. Being able to delete your account (probably by providing notification when the plugin is uninstalled)
4. More countries
5. More shopping portals

On that last note, what would you like to see next? EBay? More book sellers? Alienware? What?