Amazon EC2, 97% Complete!

Amazon AWS just fired up a private beta of persistent storage for EC2. After the public announcement of Elastic IP Addresses a couple of weeks ago, Amazon does it again with a feature we have all been crying for.

I've been intending on writing a post about EC2 web-hosting for quite a while. I'm a grumpy programmer (but I stay optimistic!), and usually my comparisons contain more CON and less PRO.

With that being said, I barely hold any case against /not/ hosting at Amazon. Where a month ago I could have shouted about dns annoyances, now we have elastic addresses. When I screamed about volatile disks, we now will soon have persistent storage.

So why am I still not kicking my dedicated server and getting 5 xen boxes for the same price? Support. Take a minute to review the most used keywords on the Amazon ec2 developers' forums, it's people crying for help. Mostly it's when their instance is inaccessible. I, for one, have been emailing support when an Amazon bug hit and disabled my account (3 times). Amazon _does_ have a form where you can email in a support ticket, but it takes days to get a reply (which is still better than freaking Paypal!.)

Support is the most important thing when you're putting your eggs in one basket. Many startups now completely rely on AWS, and when their instance is down, so is their business.

I'm not worried at all though. I've been a loyal Amazon buyer since 1998, and when panic hit and I needed help with my shipment, they provided immediate response. Amazon is terrific, and I'm sure AWS support phone is just a matter of time.