As I described in my previous post, this website is currently running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The underlying architecture of the site is based on the Drupal content management system, something that I've also described previously. I was not completely happy with the performance of my previous host (Media Temple), and Amazon EC2 promises to give you the ability to host a virtual machine running whatever you want within Amazon's data centers. You get access to the bandwidth and processing power of a huge online business, but you only pay for what you use.
In my limited testing so far, EC2 flies as a web host and appears to be able to scale for traffic spikes. It also provides a number of unique features, such as incremental snapshots of your data that are stored on S3 and the capability of creating throwaway clones of your server for doing development and testing.
Read on for a step-by-step guide to configuring a Drupal website like this one on the Elastic Compute Cloud.
