EC2 Micro Hosting Faster than Shared Host

I switched my hosting from a shared hosting provider to an Amazon EC2 Micro instance a while back. The biggest concern I had was making sure the limited resources of the micro instance were enough to run my site. As it turns out, it is more than enough. The thing the micro instance can't do is handle load that goes on for any extended time. My website doesn't receive too many hits so this is the perfect usage.

The above graph isn't from my website, but it is from a PHP web application running on EC2. The graph is from Google Webmaster Tools for a site Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) from the Google Crawler. You can definitely the switch in October from the shared host to the EC2 instance in the page response times.   During this time period the average number of people accessing the server and the crawl time stayed about the same.

The bottom line, I highly recommend an EC2 Micro instance for any small website.  While it does cost a little more than a shared host, the benefits definitely make it my top choice.  The downside to a micro instance is once you have sustained high CPU usage for a certain amount of time your are severely throttled.  As long as the usage is not sustained, your site will be very responsive.

Introducing ShouldISkipClass.com

If you know me, then this will seem very ironic.  Recently, after receiving the idea from a friend, I created the website ShouldISkipClass.com which provides random reasons why you should or shouldn't skip class.  The irony is that I personally never skip class.  It is really meant to be a joke site providing comical reasons for skipping or not skipping class.  The site didn't take me very long to create and as people provide me with more reasons I will be adding them to the rotation.

The first version of the site was a PHP based website that I had up and running in less than 20 minutes.  The second version is a little more robust and runs on Google App Engine so I don't have to worry about the traffic messing up my personal web server.  Still, this version of the site was finished in less than a few hours.  The main problem with a site like this is that people just stay on one page and click refresh so they can see all of the random reasons.  This is why I chose to go with App Engine.

It didn't take very long to create the site and since it is App Engine based there will be no real work or ongoing cost to maintain it.  Hopefully college students out there find some entertainment out of the site and share it with their friends.

The ABC's of Google

A is for Android
B is for Buzz
C is for Chrome
D is for Docs
E is for Earth
F is for Finance
G is for Groups
H is for Health
I is for Instant
J is for jQuery
K is for Knol
L is for Latitude
M is for Maps
N is for News
O is for Orcut
P is for Profile
Q is for Quick Search
R is for Reader
S is for Search
T is for Talk
U is for Uncle Sam
V is for Voice
W is for Webmaster
X is for XMPP
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zitegeist

Automated Documentation Generation

When it comes to projects that I am working on, I tend to love tools that help me develop better software.  My favorite open source developer website is Ohloh, which provides insights into code statistics.  Since my projects are hosted on Google Code and Github the code browsing, issue tracking, and wiki pages are already covered. The missing link has been generating the source code documentation such as Javadocs.

All of my projects are hosted in a Subversion of Git repository, so it is just a single command to get the most up to date code.  Generating the documentation on my server allows for an automated approach to get up to date documentation on by website.

A few of my projects are written in Java, so generating Javadocs is exactly what I did.  The difficulty in this task was getting my server to compile the Android and App Engine projects.  After some tinkering, I managed to get the correct files and configuration set up on my server.  When executing the Javadoc command, it is necessary the the project be compiled.  This documentation is excellent and matches the standard for almost all Java projects.

I also have a few open source PHP web application that I have created.  For these projects, phpDocumentor provided a method to generate documentation that is similar to Javadocs, but is specifically geared towards PHP.  The documentation for these PHP applications is not as robust as Java, mainly due to the nature and design of the language.  My PHP based projects are lacking in function and class header information making these documents less useful.  In the future I may find some time to work on refactoring and fully documenting these projects.

Lastly, I have some open source C# applications.  These applications are the best documented applications because of my use of StyleCop which enforces strict coding standards.  Older versions of Visual Studio had built in functionality to generate HTML documentation.  This has replaced with NDoc, which has been replaced with Sandcastle.  These solutions had the major downside of only running on Windows, my website runs on Linux.  Based on the limitations of these other approaches, I went with Doxygen to generate C# documentation.

Doxygen is capable of generating html based documentation from a variety of languages without the need to compile the code.  After some customization, Doxygen generates robust HTML based documentation.  While it would be possible to generate the Java and PHP documentation using Doxygen, it is not as a tuned approach for those specific languages.  For the specific requirements of documenting a C# application, it is the best solution.

The current implementation generates new documentation for my opensource projects every night based on a single script.  My next goal is to write some logic that checks for updates every night, but only regenerates the documentation if there were changes made to the source.  Overall I am very pleased that I have found a solution for all of my projects and will continue to work on improving my commenting and documentation practices.

Switching to EC2 Hosting for my Personal Website

I had been using a GoDaddy shared hosting account for my personal website since I created it, but recently changed things up. With Amazon announcing their EC2 Micro instances, cloud based hosting was within my price range. The cost of running the VM is $0.02 per hour, totaling around $14.40 per month. There are some other costs including storage and bandwidth, but they will likely total less than $2.00 per month. What it comes down to is I have my own personal install of Linux to host my web site!

This does come with some down sides.  The VM is slow, specifically the CPU.  It comes with 613 MB of RAM which is plenty for my purposes.  Since my website doesn't receive that many visits the speed is not a major concern of mine.  However, I have determined that the micro instance isn't powerful enough to handle my install of ThinkUp because the database is just too large.  This is disappointing, but I will create a new install on my Linux box and run it locally.

The reason I can justify paying twice as much for hosting is the benefits that I get from having root on the Linux box.  While it means I have to do more Linux administration, it also means I can run whatever software I want!  Specifically, I have set up a personal SVN server that I am using for class projects.  I use both Google Code and Github for open source projects, but my class projects never had a home until now.  So far it has worked out with no problems and using WebSVN provides me with a useful way to browse and analyze my code.

I have migrated my backup script to the new setup and switched to using s3cmd to transfer files to Amazon S3.  With the additional services provided on the server, the script now includes a backup of the SVN repositories and the server configuration files.

While this does mean that I will be paying more, the additional features should justify the cost.