Hosting Plone at Amazon

Definitions:

• EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
• EC2 is the server that will run 4Culture’s website.
• S3 (Amazon Simple Storage) http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
• S3 will store and backup the data from for and from the 4Culture website
• EBS (Elastic Block Storage) http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
• EBS is a persistent data storage tool. Information added to the site will be added to EBS.
• SLA (Service Level Agreement). Amazon provides an SLA for their services, which act as descriptions and guarantees regarding the availability of their services
• EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/
• AWS (Amazon Web Services) Customer Agreement: http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/
• Premium Support Information: http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/guidelines/
• Premium Support fees will be the greater of (a) the specified minimum monthly fee, or (b) a percentage of your monthly usage charges for all the Covered Services during the billing period. Regardless of when you sign up or terminate Premium Support, you are obligated to pay for a minimum of thirty (30) days of support each time you register to receive the service. We reserve the right to refuse to provide Premium Support to any customer that frequently registers for and terminates the service.

Types of Instances

 Large Standard Instance: 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform. This will allow a website to run  4-8  instances of Zope (that will provide up to 32 concurrent users) and will allow you to grow to a High CPU instance when needed.

Extra Large Standard Instance. 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform.

High-CPU Extra Large Instance. 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform.

Pricing

Server

Storage (varies with usage)

Storage is inexpensive. Pretend a site has approximately 20 GB of data. If we assume that you will triple that , and STORE 60 GB, MOVE 60GB in and MOVE 60GB out, you would pay $25.20 per month/or $302.40 per year – about the price of a large hard drive. We’ll want to also take a snapshot of your data regularly, too – for backup. So – if we assume that we do that once a day and double your storage costs – that comes to $604.80 per year

Data Transfer

• Data transfer is the biggest unknown. You pay data transfer in several ways:

When someone uploads information to the site (making an application)

When you download some information from the site (getting an image)

When people visit the site

When you take a snapshot to copy for backup purposes

As an example, a medium sized website database might be 100 GB in size and expect to average 100 I/Os per second over the course of a month. This would translate to $10 per month in storage costs (100 GB x $0.10/month), and approximately $26 per month in request costs (~2.6 million seconds/month x 100 I/O per second * $0.10 per million I/O), for a total annual cost of $432

Maintenance

It’s likely that system maintenance will take approximately 20 hours per year, or $2,100

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