Is it worth signing up for AWS Premium Support?

Question

We are planning to move the hosting to Amazon.

Has any one experienced their AWS Premium Support?

I am currently doing all admin stuff for the company and I was wondering if I signed up for this service it might ease my job a little.

Can they setup the whole hosting environment and install all the things like php mysql memcached load-balancing etc.?

How much of support can they give me?

Answer 1

Having used AWS for over a year now, I would say no. It is very expensive and whilst they are good for having a look if your server has gone down at hardware level or their general network status they are not so into actual server administration.

I would also say if you are not comfortable setting up the hosting architecture yourself than AWS may well not be for you. But if you want to get stuck in then do it properly as you can do a lot with it.

If you did want to setup something with all the features you require it is actually easier than you may think. I've listed out the software you want to run and how best to go about it (from experience)

• php - Look at Amazon Community AMIs (Amazon Machine Image - http://aws.amazon.com/amis) - There are loads setup with a LAMP stack pre configured making it easy to get going
• mysql - If you want a dedicated MySQL Server I seriously recommend Amazon's RDS service ( http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ ) - it is a great solution and really easy to setup, it also automatically handles things like backups, availability etc.
• memcached - Again plenty of community AMIs with memcached pre-installed, if you wanted this as a dedicated server there are standalone AMIs aswell as AMIs on a LAMP configuration
• load-balancing - Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing Service (ELB - http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/) makes load balancing really easy, just select the ec2 instances you want to put behind the load balancer and it does the rest

The documentation is great and with the support on their user help board I have never had to use the paid support.

If you'd like to give AWS a trial before getting stuck in they have a free tier for developers

So in a nutshell, give it a go first before committing to any support packages. I think you'll be plesantly surprised at the ease of it.

One thing you should definitely look into is going to the AWS Tech Summits that they host. They're free and have great talks/tutorials from begginers to advanced users.