Amazon Web Services

cut the guy some slack. while i would do it locally, i often find myself trying to learn a new skill as part of a project

Redtube still works guys, tested it twice. Carry on with life!

I am CTO of an internet strategy and development consultancy, and we use AWS with a lot of our clients (and our own internal infrastructure).

AWS is the original, and still best IMO, "Cloud" computing platform. That word has become so hype laden that it's meaningless, so what that really means is: they offer virtual webservers, with all the benefits that implies.

Basically they keep huge farms of servers, and customers (you) ask for a "virtual" server, of such-and-such specifications. That server has no physical existence; it's just a construct of the software in their server farm. But dammit, you get exactly the specs you asked for, and in most respects it looks and feels like a physical server.

The advantages to a webserver as a software object are many:

• You can scale up and down as fast as you can click your mouse. Want 10GB of storage? Bam. Want 1000GB? Same operation, just add a couple of zeros. Want 1 server, or 30? In an old fashioned web host, someone has to actually build and start up the physical server you want.

• You can have "pay as you go" on an incredibly granular scale. amazon charges by the capabilities of the virtual server you specify, but prorated to the number of minutes you keep it running in a month. In an old fashioned web host, your costs are in blocks of the number of servers you rent, and you rent them all 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

• You can mix and match resources as easily as you click your mouse. For example, if you have your data stored on a 100GB virtual drive ("EBS" in amazon parlance), you can move it around between servers very easily. The same is true of IP addresses, firewalling groups, all sorts of shit.

• You can easily clone, template, backup, etc your virtual machines. As an example, when I do updates on a live website's server, I clone it (takes about 45 seconds), so now I have an exact, perfect copy of the server. I run the updates on the copy, which is not live, and if they're successful I reassign the IP to the updated copy of the server, and shut down the old one.

• Amazon can offer you really specifically tailored server services based on the virtuality of the resources. For example, if you're going to run a big database I highly recommend their RDS: preconfigured, optimized, and managed database servers, totally virtual and ready to integrate into the rest of your stack. If you use caching, check out their Elasticache: preconfigured, optimized, and managed memcached caching servers, easy to configure into clusters per your specifications. They have similar service versions of lots of common needs.

• AWS is all built on an API - that's an interface that programs can use. So yeah, you can log into the web interface and manually scale your servers up and down... or you could have your website automatically respond to high traffic patterns by scaling your servers appropriately.

All "Cloud" hosting or Virtual Private Servers can offer some of this. What makes Amazon stand out is that they had an early start in the field, and they invest a FUCK TON in it. Their offering is still the best, by a LARGE MARGIN. It's complex and deep enough that people like Netflix and Reddit can base their hosting there.

the down side is that this isn't cheapo, shared hosting. And it's not managed hosting, either. Amazon provides you with resources, you have to manage and maintain them yourself. That means paying for a Sysadmin.

Highly recommended. Ask any questions you like about it, I'm happy to answer.

ec2 service with t2 micro instance will be sufficient for your usecase. you can deploy your react front end , python bot and create a database on the same ec2 instance.