Hi, I am a fan of Amazon AWS's Cloud Services. But it is not perfect. Enter Digital Ocean (https://www.digitalocean.com), an easier to use, simpler cloud hosting provider, that is cheaper and seems faster. You get a raw machine, so you still need some basic Unix admin skills, but apart from that it cannot get much easier. For just $5 a month you get this: As an SSD based machine, it feels very fast. I did some quick benchmarks at the Pharo level which show that this virtualised hardware is up to 10x faster than an Amazon AWS EC2 micro instance, and up to 3x faster than an Amazon AWS EC2 small instance. Its just a bit slower than my top of the line MacBook Air: root@stfx:~# ./pharo Pharo.image eval '1 tinyBenchmarks' '764749813 bytecodes/sec; 94679619 sends/sec' To get started on the empty machine, just do root@stfx:~# curl get.pharo.org/30+vm | bash If you picked a 32 bit Ubuntu, you only need to do root@stfx:~# apt-get install libssl0.9.8 Starting a Zn server is dead easy: root@stfx:~# ./pharo Pharo.image eval --no-quit 'ZnServer startDefaultOn: 1701' & Have a look at: http://82.196.12.54:1701 Which is a single vm+image instance. Local network performance is quite good: root@stfx:~# ab -k -n 1024 -c 4 http://localhost:1701/bytes Server Software: Zinc Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 1701 Document Path: /bytes Document Length: 64 bytes Concurrency Level: 4 Time taken for tests: 0.584 seconds Complete requests: 1024 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Keep-Alive requests: 1024 Total transferred: 243712 bytes HTML transferred: 65536 bytes Requests per second: 1753.68 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 2.281 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.570 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 407.59 [Kbytes/sec] received I also tried a big config based build that downloaded and compiled about 1Gb worth of .mcz and that took less than 4 minutes which is also quite fast. Of course, you get way fewer features than with Amazon AWS (the total ecosystem). But for the price it seems hard to beat. Have fun ! Sven PS: Feel free to do me a favour by using this link https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=6a0334a169dc -- Sven Van Caekenberghe Proudly supporting Pharo http://pharo.org http://association.pharo.org http://consortium.pharo.org
