Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> If you want to use it just for yourself, sure. If you want it to 
>>> provide a service to other people... well, no way to know when those 
>>> service requests will arrive, eh?
>>
>> Sure. Then it's doing something.
> 
> Perhaps you're missing my point. I get charged for running the server 
> 24/7, when it only gets maybe 3 hits per month. That's really expensive, 
> no?

I understand your point. :-)

> Interesting. It appears from the documentation that the contents of a 
> bucket cannot be hierachical...

URLs aren't either. Put a slash in the name of the file you store in the bucket.

It's a bit more complicated, really.

> I have a blog, but I'm not very happy with it. I'd like to write my own 
> blog engine and run that. (In Haskell, naturally.)

So you're talking about the form that takes comments?

> But would it be cheaper to buy a new Intel Core i7 and run it on that? 
> (Once I've bought it, I can use it endlessly for nothing.)

Certainly renting is more expensive in the long run than buying. But that's 
why it's the *elastic* compute cloud, you see.

>> Not sure what the virtualdub part involves
> Transforming 6,000 frames into a single AVI so I can download it.

Ah, something you can script, then?

>> but you can log in remotely, you know.
> 
> What, and be charged for 7 hours of computer time when the instance has 
> finished rendering and is just sitting there waiting for me to tell it 
> to transcode the video? :-P

You realize that 7 hours of compute time translates to less than a dollar, 
right? Even if you let it go that long without checking, and didn't bother 
to set it up to send you an email when it finished?

>> Posting the stuff up to S3 isn't hard either. I can give you a script 
>> that pushes a directory up to S3 if you want, too.
> 
> I guess the fun part is if an instance "fails" during a render. 
> Apparently it can do that. No refunds...

I've been running one for a company for something like 2 years. The only 
time it "failed" is when they told me a couple months in advance that they'd 
be cutting over to a new way of doing IP addressing, and please migrate 
anything over to a new machine.  I.e., I've never had the machine crash.

I think it's far more CYA - "don't run your database on a machine that might 
crash and never make backups then blame us" - than any expectation that any 
given machine will fail at any particular time.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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