Load Speeds are Important

I bought some hosting space on iPage in February of 2011, the service was cheap, space was unlimited and I guess I got what I paid for when it came to speed; fairly slow load times. I wasn't happy enough with the load times to move the contents of my blog over to the site and domain that I've been playing with. But I'll make the appropriate announcement when I finally find a decent hosting solution.

I have been toying with getting onto Amazon AWS and setting up my own server and having my own space. The great thing is that I would have some persistent computing power available to me to run some automated applications. I really think that there are many fun things that one can do with having a server, without having the need to own the hardware to do things.

I am somewhat reluctant at using my main computing box at home as a server since I want something that I could completely crash with impunity but I am not really that interested in having a second full blown desktop computer at home. One option that I've been contemplating is using a MacMini as a server due to its really small foot print, the price is reasonable too at about $700 for a system with 4GB of memory.

Interestingly the same system sells for about $100 more when buying through the Japanese Mac Store. I think the exchange rate is playing with the price significantly as the Yen has sky rocketed (time for the arbitration??).

Time to do some research, but with some effort, it is possible to setup a server on AWS for about $110/year and have some fairly decent speeds. Storage goes for about $0.10/month meaning that I could have 4-5 Gigs of website data easily and still be only paying about $0.50/month in storage. Seems really reasonable to me.

All I would need to test is latency and bandwidth. If things look good, I'll probably make the switch.