New Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

The good folks at Amazon have announced a new pricing scheme called a Reserved Instance to complement the On Demand instance. For a low one time payment, and about 20% of the instance hour cost, you can reserve capacity on 1 or 3 year terms. If you want to tie yourself into a long term contract but have a significantly reduced rate resulting in savings, this is the option for you.

For a standard instance, on a per use basis you will pay approximately $880 for one year. Using the new reserved instance, you will pay about $580 for a savings of around $300. These are just rough estimates, but a reserved instance saves you around 30-50% versus On Demand instances.  The longer the term, the better your savings.  You will save $1300 on a 3 year term deal against an on demand instance running for 3 years straight.
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Mongrel Gem and Paperclip Plugin Problems

This problem occurred when setting up a site using mongrel along with the paperclip rails plugin. After about a week of normal operation we started having lots of problems with the automated image resizing required by the rails application.

It was running along and generating all the images just fine, then all of a sudden it stopped processing the ‘large’ images or made them blurry, and we started seeing the following in the application logs:

Paperclip::NotIdentifiedByImageMagickError: /folder/stream.####.# is not recognized by the 'indentify' command.

This is a very strange problem since the development environments work just fine and the developers were insistent that the server was the problem and not the code, as they usually do.
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Costs Using Amazon EC2 & S3

Figuring out all the costs when hosting on EC2 using S3 storage can be tricky. This is break down of what you can approximately expect to pay using a few basic scenarios, such as a lamp server and S3 backups, with Amazon services. This will also compare the costs to what you would expect to pay if you want to do the hosting yourself.

To fully understand EC2 charges, you need to know the difference between the instance types and what they cost to best meet your requirements. For the purpose of this post I will summarize – I have converted the Amazon Compute Units into basic CPU power and will then detail the costs based upon each of these instances.
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Disposable Email Addresses

So many times on the web you are asked for an email address when you would really prefer not to give it out. There are so many ‘one time use sites’ that once they get your address you are a victim of SPAM forever. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service that could provide a temporary email address for sign ups? Well there is and they have existed for quite some time.

Enter Melt Mail, a disposable email address service. Now they aren’t the only kids on the block, but I like them a lot.

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Want to Share Your Problems?

After a very bad week, we decided to launch a new site to allow anyone to sign up and post stories about bad things that have happened to them as a result of bad circumstances. Everyone has those days where Murphy’s Law is determined to screw them over, resulting in outcomes that were far from desired. We have called these occurrences – shitcumstances.  These are the times in life when you feel the fates are conspiring against you and nothing goes right, but it is not your fault. Like when you apply a new computer patch only to find out it breaks everything…

When you just need to let it all out, why not do it in an anonymous and public forum.  Tell the world what happened to you and we will share your pain.  With the current economic downturn, there are many people suffering from shitcumstances, we want to hear from you! Sign up for an account and have your grievances heard.
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