Gone DigitalOcean
In order to try something new (and save money) I switched my personal "utility" server from EC2 to DigitalOcean. As I was running just a t1.micro instance anyway, I selected DigitalOcean's cheapest offering, which costs $5/month (512MB/20GB(SSD)/1TB). Plus $1/month for regular backups (they somehow backup the whole server while the server is running, so I'm not sure how consistent said backup can possibly be but at least it's cheap).
DigitalOcean is offering just servers, and the whole experience isn't of course quite as polished as with Amazon. Nor can you, say, access S3 (or other services) at quite the same speed as when in Amazon's network. But for my use case it's a good fit.
Categorised as: meta