Due to a change in circumstances I have had to move my blog and a number of other websites away from a VPS hosted with 1&1 to another provider. After asking around I was drawn to Amazon Web Services, specifically EC2.

The process of getting a Windows instance operational was painless and I had everything relocated inside of an hour, even the DNS took less than 5 minutes to update. Still got some more things to move across but so far I am quite happy. The amount of control available through the administration system is impressive and I am already having thoughts about how I could be using other parts of Amazon’s cloud services.

I have done some sums on the expected cost of the instance running this server and for what I am getting as well as the configuration options available, the price is extremely reasonable. If I wanted to go with a “micro” linux instance I could be running for a year without paying a penny but alas, the curse of being a .NET dev is needing IIS.

So, hello cloud, lets see if we can get along.