There are Virtualmin GPL and Virtualmin Professional users hosting exclusively on EC2. Several friends of ours who have new web startups are also using EC2 either along-side traditional hosting or exclusively. Many more are using S3 for storage of some or all of their content. It is a valid path. It is certainly economically feasible–for most users it is cheaper than a similarly equipped dedicated box, and about the same price as virtual private servers from other similar providers (like RimuHosting, Joyent, Gridzones, etc.). I wouldn’t compare them to vserver or OpenVZ or Virtuozzo based virtual servers, due to differences in the architecture and pretty significant reliability/performance differences, but I believe EC2 is still cost competitive with most major providers of such accounts.
VM2 is a UI layer to enable one to deal with many systems of many types (real, EC2, vserver, Zones, Xen). It makes large-scale hosting easier and more efficient. The target is mainly hosting providers, but if you aren’t a hosting provider but still have many hosts to manage, then it will serve you well (we use it a lot, and we only have three physical servers and a few virtualized servers–most of our testing infrastructure is moving onto Xen instances managed by VM2, and our demo is already running on a VM2 managed instance…and Webmin.com email goes through an EC2 server, so we’re eating our own dog food on all fronts).
As for the persistence issue: You get 10GB of persistent storage, and 160GB of ephemeral storage. The 160GB MUST be backed up to S3 periodically for safety, and it must be backed up whenever you shutdown the EC2 instance. This is a minor issue. You kinda have to view EC2 paired with S3 to consider it for hosting–you need the S3 storage layer in order to do anything really interesting.
One of the big sticking points has been resolved recently with the new IP address management that Amazon has announced, and Jamie has already added support for it in the next VM2 version. I don’t think Virtualmin needs to be aware of this change (though it used to need to be setup for Dynamic DNS based hosting, which is no longer necessary, though it isn’t a bad solution).
So, in short, we’re not moving everything to EC2 by any means, but I do think that for many classes of problem EC2 is a valid choice. It does have a reputation for reliability problems, which is definitely something you want to think about (a few hours of down-time may seem insignificant, and it probably is…but if it happens at just the wrong time, like when an investor or big customer happens to be looking into your business, it can have a pretty dramatic impact, so I consider reliability an important factor in host selection). S3 is a bit more proven and has a better reliability record (with one huge glaring many-hours long outage a few months ago that blows the whole curve, though). It’s certainly a good choice for backups. It’s off-site, fast, and they seem to have the data integrity problem solved very well (so once you put something into S3, I think you can pretty much consider the data “safe” forever and ever). Virtualmin Professional includes S3 backup support, by the way, though there are some limits–5GB per-domain, specifically.
Does that answer your questions?
