ec2

Amazon.com site outage doesn't exactly inspire confidence in world domination plans

Jackson West · 06/06/08 12:40PM

It's one thing when Twitter goes limp (again). It's another when e-commerce oligarch Amazon.com can't keep it up for customers. But that's just what readers are reporting, and we've confirmed. I mean, if you're going to rule the Web, it really is best to remain virile atop your throne. Sure it means lost sales for Amazon — and for its network of affiliates — but our question is, are Web startups using the company's "cloud" services such as EC2 also experiencing problems? Update: Even an attempt to access the site via IP address instead of domain name is for naught, ruling out a simple DNS issue.

Amazon.com's grid-computing service goes offline for 90 minutes, saving its profitless customers money

Jordan Golson · 04/07/08 12:40PM

A number of servers running Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which provides pay-by-the-hour computation, went offline this morning from 2 to 3:30 a.m. EC2 is one of Amazon's developer services, offering low-cost virtual servers mostly to startups. Dozens of users complained in this thread on Amazon's message board, where an Amazon staffer reported the "notworking team" — a Freudian slip for "networking"? — was on the problem. What were they complaining about? That their websites stopped losing money for 90 minutes?

Amazon.com gives startups a 50-percent-off sale

Owen Thomas · 02/27/08 04:20PM

Jeff Bezos likes to say he's in the business of delighting customers. And then he delivers that howling, hooting laugh. The latest guffaw-provoker: Amazon EC2, a service which lets startups run their programs on servers housed in Amazon.com's datacenters. When it launched, Amazon promised "the equivalent of a 1.7GHz x86 processor" — in other words, a fairly low-powered server, but at the cost of a dime an hour. Ted Dziuba, the acid-tongued former editor of Uncov, found that Amazon actually delivered half that performance. Why haven't you heard more about this? Likely because most of the me-too, slapdash websites making use of Amazon's EC2 aren't running anything more processor-intensive than an index-hit SQL select.