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
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:
Which is a single vm+image instance.
Local network performance is quite good:
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