A few days ago I wrote a post about why I switched to Rackspace from EC2. While I don’t believe I’m likely to ever switch back to EC2 for my personal site, I’m not going to say they’ll never get my business again. The past few years I’ve sung the praises of EC2 to people I know looking for a decent VPS that isn’t overly costly and gives a good deal of flexibility. I’ll continue to sing their praises a bit in this post as well.

First let me say this isn’t an advertisement for Rackspace Cloud, but it will likely sound like one. In reality, this is more a post about the serious shortcomings of EC2.

That said, I switched hosts from EC2 to Rackspace cloud recently after a couple serious problems with EC2. I knew that EC2′s instances were not persistant. Knowing that, I, thankfully, made sure to have very extensive and very frequent backups that I kept in a couple places. What I didn’t realize is that EC2 has absolutely no support for the basic instance services. You can’t call, you can’t email, you can’t even put in a support ticket. The only support option you get is the ability to post to the user support community forums. There is no guarantee you’ll actually get a response to any post you make.

I likely should have sent this out earlier, but I’ve been super busy as of late.

As of August 23, 2010 I’m working full time for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that manages Wikipedia and sister sites, as Operations Engineer. Some of the content of this blog may change slightly as my duties are focused in slightly different places now. You’ll likely see less PKI, Red Hat, Solaris, and authentication posts, but you’ll probably see more Puppet, Apache, LVS, Varnish, Squid, MySQL, and virtualization posts.

My goals for the year are: