As of today, all MineOS-related websites, including this forum, the wiki, and related services are all on Digital Ocean servers, completing my migration away from Amazon EC2.
Regarding the performance and usability of EC2, I have this to say about my experience.
- Amazon EC2 and micro.t1 is hugely insufficient for a MediaWiki
- Amazon EC2 is way too expensive
I moved my servers to digital ocean, which one day in I’m already infinitely more pleased. The t1.micro that I used from the Amazon free tier has a connection limit like 5 concurrent or something pathetically slow, but I had learned to be content with–because it was free.
Once my free tier ended, this August, my estimated price for monthly hosting was about $15. This is $14.64 dollars with the continued low connection count, 600mb of RAM and inability to upsize to a modern generation instance, such as t2.micro ($9.52) or t2.small ($19.04). This basically meant that I could continue to pay for a weak instance (t1.micro more expensive than the stronger t2.micro) or I could manually move my content.
As it turns out, because of my desire to deploy a Discourse forum, the minimum memory required is 1GB, ensuring at least a $9.52 bill or a more and an over-extended server. A t2.small would’ve given me 2GB, but still only 1CPU and limited connection capacity.
In the end, 2GB of RAM, 2 CPUs and 40GB of SSD came out to $20.00 even, which despite being more expensive than even t2.small no longer limits me to a potential of 20% of a CPU along with the other slowness I’ve experienced on Mediawiki. In addition, I can now choose to in-source my MineOS ISO hosting which previously cost me more than $10 a month on Amazon S3 (so I brought it to Dropbox).
Ultimately, I’m getting a stronger VPS @ $20.00 than I could with t2.small with Dropbox. I’m pretty pleased.