So, as you’ve previously read here and on twitter, I’ve been feverishly working on a side project to get it code complete for iteration 1 by today. I’m happy to say we’re pretty much there – some extras to do, but all can be achieved hopefully!

I’ll be able to share more about it asap, but here’s some things I’ve picked up which may/may not help you out when getting a web app ready…

Hosting
We’ve gone for Amazon EC2 hosting for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s very flexible and extremely quick to scale up/down
2. No minimum contract

As with all new startups, you never know how popular, or how rubbish your project will become – EC2 enables you to scale up quite quickly if it starts to sail, and also, call it a day pretty darn quickly without any financial penalisation. Nice! There are some obvious risks with EC2 instances, the main one being if Amazon have a serious hardware or software fault, your instance/instances could all be killed, and with that, all data that is on them – so be prepared. I’m looking into using EBS snapshots , which is persistent storage for your instances (they mount as drives on your instance, and wont die if your instance does. You do want to back these up on S3 though regularly..

Email Hosting
At first we started with the Windows Server 2003 POP3/SMTP server add-on to manage our mailboxes and send our mail. I quickly found (within 30 mins) that the POP3 support outside of Outlook and Outlook Express is pretty much non existent - bit sucky for me as I use a MacBook Pro and iPhone pre-dominantly.

SMTP was behaving fine, however we needed another mailbox solution…. Welcome Google Apps. Google will host your mail, calendars, chat, sites (as in Google Sites) etc all for your domain for free on the Standard Edition (it’s ad supported like the personal editions). All we had to do was verify our domain by placing an HTML file on the server for Google to check on, and also update our MX records on the domain to point to Google’s mail servers.

Within an hour, we had our mail redirecting to GMail, mailboxes setup, and iPhones configured to receive (setup exactly the same as a normal GMail account, other than using your full email address as the username). A great free solution to our problem, and we can always upgrade for the paid for premium version if ever necessary.

General
Make sure you remember to open the relevant ports in your security groups on EC2 instances (You can do this in Elastifox). By default, pretty much nothing is open other than the RDP port, so you need to open ports 80 for HTTP, 25 for SMTP etc etc as you add services.

We’re really interested to find out how our standalone instance will perform under load – if possible we’ll try and run some load testing on it asap.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 and is filed under AWS, Development, Technology, chatterbloc. 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.