An all too familiar problem that Web startups face today is the need to cater for a sudden spike in traffic. We all want the traffic but can we handle the load? Funding a server farm pre-series A can be quite an expense! So when we had the opportunity to register for the Amazon EC2 closed beta we jumped at it.
This the official description of what EC2 offers:
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.”
The EC2 configuration that the Technology Preview is running on is rather modest and does not have the ability to scale automatically. Our initial estimate was that we could accommodate up to1500 users. So far, we have signed up 2000 users and have not had to worry about overloading the server. As a result, we have decided to release an additional 2000 accounts immediately.
Going forward, we will be working on improving our server infrastructure so that we can take full advantage of Amazon’s hosting service. We hope to achieve this soon so that we can completely remove the account limitation. We’ll keep you posted…