Move to Cloud

I'm giving serious consideration to moving my sites out to AWS. To have a tiny instance running 24/7 will cost $105.

Setup

One tiny instance will run all the live sites, another tiny instance will be used for development. This will also host a Git server.

Comparison

Advantages

• Faster (this is a big problem with D5)
• Scalable (but do I really need this)
• Isolated Dev environment (and stage if I ever need)
• I can run whatever I want (Git, Postgre, Python, Java)

Disadvantages

• Cost (though in reality, I'm already paying this much because of the stupid 'privacy' thing that got turned on'
• Steep learning curve
• I will have to transfer all my sites
• There is a lot more room for me to screw up

Plan

1. Get a tiny instance up and running with a lamp stack
2. Buy a test domain from Amazon and get that hooked up
3. Terminate it and make sure the EBS volume sticks around
4. Reattach the volume to a new instance
5. Try attaching the volume to larger instance.
6. Transfer the sites over (data)
7. Confirm everything is up, running and works
8. Transfer domains
9. Try to figure out SSL

Also try

• Put the database (data) on a separate EBS volume
• Try running that volume on a separate instance (one for apache, one for MySql) - this would allow a lot of scaleability
• Running FTP server
• Running GIT

Registrars

http://lifehacker.com/5943452/five-best-domain-name-registrars

Should move away from Dot 5, just not what I need.

Things to Learn

• How to backup/restore an image
• Databases - how do they work? (can I get WP setup with the database on another server, can I move the DB around?)
• cpanel, webmin? Needs some research.
• I should really learn vim
• https?