This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz by Phillip Pearson. Original Post: Great timing, Amazon! Feed Title: Second p0st Feed URL: http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/rss.xml Feed Description: Tech notes and web hackery from the guy that brought you bzero, Python Community Server, the Blogging Ecosystem and the Internet Topic Exchange Latest Python Buzz Posts Latest Python Buzz Posts by Phillip Pearson Latest Posts From Second p0st

So last night I thought I'd take a crack at clearing out all the spam that's keeping me from re-enabling comments on this blog (the database is 1.5G - far too large for my little 256M server to handle). Not wanting to wait for the whole DB to download to my system at home, I pushed a copy of it to S3 and spawned a "large" EC2 instance, then enjoyed working on a system with 7.5G of RAM, plenty to hold the whole DB in cache and leave lots of room for sorting, the key buffer etc.

Encouraged by the experience, I'm thinking I should move more of my stuff over there. This little server is going to get much more expensive sometime next year as Layered Tech just raised their prices, to the point where EC2 would be cheaper and give me more RAM to play with.

So this morning, I started up an EC2 instance to work on, logged in, ran my script to install all the stuff I need to work on the project, then started getting "503 Service Unavailable" errors when trying to download the DB image from S3. Huh?

Oh - looks like I picked the day before a huge S3 outage to become a convert. D'oh!

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