I was attracted by per hour pricing of Amazon cloud hosting – to see how things work out, I decided to give it a try.

The Good Part
The entry level is “micro instance” -free of cost for 750 hrs a month. I quickly calculated 24×30=720 -hmm and it works. It says, it good for small traffic -perfect! I just had couple of visitors per HOUR! Nothing can be lesser than that 😉

Background of my APP -its a enterprise app, CPU intensive and high on DB queries. Wanted to demo a couple of clients so was just looking around for some cheap option and I stumbled upon “Free” option.

And The Bad Part
My excitement did not last longer -I noticed a behavior that for a couple of ‘seconds’ things would work as fast as its locally deployed but just a couple of minutes of continuous usage -and thing would come to grinding halt:(

I would have smelled fishy on my side if I could produce this behavior locally, but I have been running this app in LAB environment for a couple of days without any issue.

I spend couple of hours searching for the root cause and I stumble upon this -Thanks god, it saved me a hell lot of effort! Visit this blog and it’s nicely described how “stealed CPU” is the culprit!

So is micro instance any worth ? Only if you want to get a first hand feel of deployments in the cloud and a pat that “hooo -my app is running in ‘cloud’ “, nothing more nothing less!

For starter and less traffic -use their small instance which as on today comes at .080$ in singapore zone. As explained in the blog-at least it will provide consistent behavior.