Amazon EC2: a foundation for a CiviCRM based ASP?

Earlier this month Evan posted a query about a CiviCRM AMI for Amazon EC2. Joe Murray responded with some proof of concept scripts along with the persistent storage space limitations in EC2. Seems like the folks at EC2 have been busy addressing these limitations and have introduced persistent storage support for EC2 (its currently in beta). This perked my interest enough, that I spent a few hours over the weekend exploring and thinking about the possibility of using EC2 + Storage as a potential deployment engine for CiviCRM. I think building a base AMI to do this is quite easy, which follows that we can script upgrades, backups and the other missing pieces for a reliable "indivdualized" online hosting service. The tech savvy users can basically logon to their virtual server and add/configure any other modules/open source programs they desire. This also avoids the issue of building the data center infrastructure that we have assumed an ASP would need. The only downside is that EC2 is not a cheap service. At the lowest price point it comes down to approx $100/month for a good CPU and a significant amount of bandwidth. I suspect over time these prices will go down, but a good virtual server with those specs will probably cost you as much. Any thoughts or comments on this?

Comments

For me, the major benefit of EC2 is that you can add more servers on your install whenever you need it.

I really see that as a big advantage when you have to scale because visitors are at the door. I'm not quite sure that's a major concern with a CRM, where the traffic/requests mostly depends on the number of users, something that doesn't skyrocket overnight.

As for the cost, cheaper to have your own dedicated server, probably.

X+

I think dedicated servers are significantly more expensive than ec2 pricing. At our last colo with a dedicated server + some sys admin we were paying approx $150 a month. We also owned these machines, if we leased them the price would be a bit more, $250. (compared to $100 or so a month at EC2 for the small instance). This was really cheap compared to services from an established hosting provider like rackspace.

I think my take is, you can build an ASP solution out there on hardware/resources/network managed by someone else at a reasonable price with the ability to scale quite easily and rapidly

lobo