> What's the difference between EC2 and a VPS for you?
For me it that restarting an EC2 instance deletes all the local storage. I have had good success just getting a big ass VPS, and running the database locally, and pushing text backups to S3. It is trivial to manage, and in the real world, downtime is more likely to be caused by configuration wonkiness than hardware failures.
You also have to have a huge amount of traffic to overwhelm a 24core / 96GB ram server. Why not put off the managing the complexity until you really are doing 10M page views per day?
If you where having all your data deleted when you restarted your EC2 server, then something was VERY wrong. I'm not an expert, but I've used EC2 a little bit and I think I hit that exact problem.
The thing is that for whatever reason, data wasn't being written to the EBS (the virtual hard disks for use with EC2 instances) and was instead being written to the "ephemeral storage", a really big local data store that every EC2 instance has that is basically a `/tmp` directory. If the server restarts, everything in the ephemeral storage is destroyed.
EBS is a slow turd. Running a database on EBS is running a database on network attached storage. I know tons of people do this, but I have no idea why. Provisioned IOPS will work, but it is expensive.
Local storage on a $5 Digital Ocean plan will do 2000 IOPS, where as that would cost $200/month with Amazon Provisioned IOPS. I know it is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is worth thinking about. Running a database on a local SSD is a good option for many people, and it is not an option that Amazon offers.
Actually there absolutely is an instance type for this. It's the high storage io instance. Not cheap, but if you want local SSD it is definitely on the menu
For me it that restarting an EC2 instance deletes all the local storage. I have had good success just getting a big ass VPS, and running the database locally, and pushing text backups to S3. It is trivial to manage, and in the real world, downtime is more likely to be caused by configuration wonkiness than hardware failures.
You also have to have a huge amount of traffic to overwhelm a 24core / 96GB ram server. Why not put off the managing the complexity until you really are doing 10M page views per day?