Cloud Hosting - Cheap Providers?

[Lundis]

So I have a project course at uni, and we're creating a web solution for student associations. I'm looking into the business aspects, and thus the question of how to host everything came up. Our mentor suggested cloud hosting, so I've been trying to find a service that provides appropriate functionality, but maybe I just don't know the right terms to search for, since all alternatives I've found have been really expensive and don't really seem to fit a web solution provider.

I was thinking something like:
* One customer per node
* Ability to get additional nodes at any time (preferably one at a time)
* Cheap (max 10-20€ a year per node)
* 20-50 customers for starters, should be scalable
* Minimum 10GB per node

There would be very low traffic to the sites in general, so there's no need for the nodes to have a lot of computing power.

It feels like we should just go with regular hosting. Are there _any_ cloud alternatives?

[bad_brain]

hm, had a look at AWS already?

[z3r0aCc3Ss]

Yup. AWS would be a great choice.

[Lundis]

I looked at AWS earlier, but they're really bad at presenting their stuff to smaller users who don't think a huge scalable database with terabytes of traffic is cool. Anyway I found this pricing calculator.

Do you know how the hourly computing power is calculated? imo it would be logical if it was virtual CPU utilization, but it sounds more like you have to pay for 100% usage if you want a website running 24/7? If it's CPU utilization it would be possible to make my price target, otherwise... no way.

I liked their backup service though... 1c/GB-month! Could definitely use that + cheap regular hosting.

[lilrofl]

it doesn't exactly meet your needs, but AWS offers a free-tier service for 1 year called EC2.

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750 hours of EC2 running Linux, RHEL, or SLES t2.micro instance usage
750 hours of EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server t2.micro instance usage
750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage in any combination of General Purpose (SSD) or 
          Magnetic, plus 2 million I/Os (with Magnetic) and 1 GB of snapshot storage
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
1 GB of Regional Data Transfer

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http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

[ayu]

Another choice that might work (the one I use).

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https://www.digitalocean.com/

[Lundis]

Thanks for the replies. It doesn't seem like cloud hosting fits in the budget the way I had imagined it might be able to do.

Digital Ocean looks really nice and easy to understand. That could probably be used for something as well... I think I'll get an account for myself when my Bluehost account expires.

[l0ngb1t]

ignore all the below, i didn;t read your post well, i taught that you want to build a cloud hosting platform. ADMINS YOU CAN DELETE MY POST


these two are not web hosting related, more like vps hosting...
Cloudstack and openstack
i can provide you with a detailed document concerning the setup of openstack, one that i did my self.

[ayu]

btw, if you want to try DigitalOcean then I have a referrer link here.
It gives you $10 (which is one VPS) for free.
And if you decide to become a full customer I get $25 for my VPS.
Everybody wins.

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https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=e8b5a6ddbb3e

[l0ngb1t]

@cats
so impressed by the control panel i might subscribe!

[bad_brain]

I have to admit it DO look nice.....the only feature I kinda miss is the one to set rDNS records for the hostname, but that would just have been a "nice to have thing" and is not really a vital feature.

[ayu]

@cats
so impressed by the control panel i might subscribe!

Indeed it's really neat!