Lot of answers because you have lot of questions ™ ;-)


  1. Are my pricing assumptions above correct ?

    $72/month for a small instance. And, create a large instance for the vBarter web and database server for $288/month

    In addition to this, there will be bandwidth charges. The bandwidth charges are $0.10 per GB for US cloud.

  2. I have 30GBoutgoing bandwidth usage. So what will be my monthly bandwidth usage bill?

    30 * 0.10 = 3$

  3. How much a small instance with 30GB outgoing data transfer ?

    72 + 3 = 75 USD

  4. is that all ?

    No you will have to consider the incoming data transfer too. Which is again charged at 0.1 USD / GB

  5. How much small instance with 30GB outgoing and 10GB incoming will cost me?

    76USD

  6. Can I host multiple websites on a single EC2 instance

    Yes

  7. Are there any additional costs besides the instance and bandwidth ?

    If you enable EBS for backup, there will be additional cost otherwise No.

  8. Can we run everything on one large instance or do we need two instances? - one large and one small

    Depends on the server load. For your setup, we can have one DEV server on a small instance and live vbarter.com on a large instance

  9. Will our Perl app and Postgre database run in this environment or would we need to be port it to MySql as I didn?t see Postgre on their website?

    EC2 is like virtual hardware and you can multitude of operating systems - various Linux flavors, Windows flavors, OpenSolaris etc and any application that runs on these operating systems, provided they need only one public IP will run on EC2

  10. Why only one Public IP ?

    Amazon AWS/EC2 provides public IPs via their NAT based technology called Elaspic IP. As now only one Elastic IP can be assigned to an instance and that is one of the biggest drawbacks of the EC2 offering.

  11. Will we be able to have the current versions of Linux Apache, Postgre and Perl?

    Yes. All the bleeding edge softwares when it comes Linux ! - one more reason to embrace FOSS

  12. How would I access our server to view for example the Perl app or scripts?

    SSH / FTP / NFS / telnet or rsh (will be blocked but still)

  13. Will I be able to access the database tables to view and edit data via FTP as I do now?

    Yes

  14. Can you set up or oversee the set-up and configuration of the one or two instances for the two servers and websites?

    Yes. We can setup the instances, setup the backup, make the DNS changes, install the SSL certificates etc

  15. Have you done this before for other clients? If yes, for how many clients and how long have they been on Amazon? Have they had any issues?

    We haven't started providing the support. As you know the cloud services are new and we are one of the first players to enter the migrate to cloud arena. We have done thorough research for months we have tested various applications thoroughly.

    As of now the biggest limitation of the EC2 platform is that it supports only single IP. The solution is exceptionally stable and the backup solution also is giving impressive results. In general the drawback is that you need someone like us to integrate the parts and make a solution.

  16. How long would it take to install and set-up and what would the cost be?

    An EC2 instance with plain operating system will be ready and running and accessible via a public IP in less than 10 minutes. Once it is done, setting up the application will take the same time it will take in a normal dedicated server. After that the backup solution will take another 1 day to complete. Provided you are not looking for geographically separated backup and point in time snapshots etc.

  17. What about ongoing maintenance and support? I currently have exceptional 24/7 support at Rackspace. Who will provide 24/7 support. Amazon? Spark? Both Spark and Amazon?

    All application and normal server issues can be handled by Sparksupport.com. We will need Amazon support's help only in the instance of a corrupt backup. Ie if need to restore from a backup and the backup itself crashed or if the entire EC2/S3/EBS system fails, we will need Amazon's support. But that is very unlikely considering their exceptionally good data centers and backup technology.

  18. Does Amazon provide hardware support, or in cloud computing is that not necessary?

    We don't need hardware support at all. Getting rid of hardware is one of the positive sides of cloud computing. The cloud is a SaaS model where you get all services from internet cloud. The hardware is transparent to you. The cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model and it is 100% scalable.

  19. If Spark will provide support, is there someone available 24/7 when you are sleeping for 2-3 hours a day? How would I contact them?

    You can sign up for out per-incident plan and there will be someone to answer your queries 24x7. We will give you access to our bugziila and you can open a ticket wit us for issues. As of now, you can a mail to alert@sparksupport.com or contact AIM: sparktechs - ( right now you may have to ask them to contact me as only me, shijil & premsai are familiar with your system and noone else has access to your servers)

  20. What is the monthly cost for support?

    You can use our per-incident plan which will be charged at a rate hourly rate.

  21. What about weekly and incremental daily back-up. How is that handled?

    By default amazon is not providing a ready made backup solution. We will configure a backup solution for you which will take a snapshot of your data and store in persistent storage.

  22. If we need to restore data, who does that?

    In all the normal scenarios other than loosing the persistent storage, sparksupport will do data restoration for you.