Probably not very exciting to many, but I just finished moving roobasoft.com and 7 other domains from 2 virtual private servers and 1 dedicated server over to 1 EC2 instance. The move was surprisingly painless.

Why did I do all this? The main reason was because the one dedicated server was real cheap and scared me. It was a single disk setup with zero redundancy and only nightly backups of critical data that I had to setup manually. I had gotten away with running in that setup for about a year and it was really only a matter of time before that machine failed me. If that hard drive or any part of the machine failed I’d have to rebuild the server from scratch and manually restore the critical data.

After moving to EC2 I have a custom image that I boot with all my configuration setup and an elastic block storage volume with all the database and other changing data stored on it. The volume is easy to take snapshots of and I feel pretty good about the whole setup.

The only gotcha I hit was when I tried to run two SSL virtual hosts off the same IP. Turns out you can’t do that. The recommended solution is to use separate IP addresses to differentiate the hosts. However, EC2 currently only allows you to bind one public IP per instance. I went with the solution to keep one vhost on the standard https port, 443, and the other on a non-standard port. Not pretty, but it’s working for now.

Some light details about the setup:

• Apache virtual hosts are serving the 8 domains
• mod_rails is taking care of the 4 domains that are rails applications. So far I’m very pleased with mod_rails - add a new vhost and bam, it just works. No monkeying with mongrel_cluster yaml files.
• Sending of mail is being taken care of by authsmtp.com. This is new for me but so far I’m happy. I always hate setting up sending or anything related to email on a server. Was happy to outsource this.
• DNS is now being hosted by https://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/. Not a pretty app, but it does the job at a decent price and it’s something I’ll rarely have to tweak.

Thanks to Jonathan for helping with the move and recommending the DNS host. It was nice to know someone who also did a similar migration in case things blew up (he recently moved Round Haus to EC2).

In summary I’m really happy with the new setup. We’ll see how long I stay happy.

note: I was fairly light on the details of the move (post was already long enough). If anyones interested, feel free to email me or comment here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 12:06 am and is filed under Commentary, Other, roobasoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.