Being a relatively new company we’ve been looking at cost effective ways of hosting applications in dev and test for clients as well as hosting applications used internally in SAASTEK such as JIRA, KnowledgeTree, etc etc.
These are the options that seem to be out there
* Purchase a server, configure it and use as dev/test server – Cons: Expense of purchasing a server, workload of maintanance, etc, etc
* Purchase dedicated hosting from a service provider – Cons: Fixed fee makes it difficult to justify the outlay at this stage, especially for Java hosting
* Purchaser virtual hosting – This is a more viable option, can match usage to resources used
* Cloud Computing – Namely the Amazon Cloud computing services, EC2, S3, etc etc.
At the moment I’m looking at the Amazon solution. After some research it seems possible to host a Windows Server instance on Amazon.
Here
The plan is to use the following image of WS2003 and run it on Fedora Core 6 as per this article
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=592&categoryID=101
Firstly though I’ve toyed around with getting a standard image provided by Amazon up and running, it’s really quite straightforward:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/2007-03-01/GettingStartedGuide/
Once the WS2003 instance is up and running and I install a prototype system under development onto the instance I should be able to carry out a proper cost comparasion between the different hosting options.
