initial work with Amazon's Web Service for sustainable sites

As an alternative free hosting option I have started looking at Amazon's web service. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/free/
To give some idea of why I have copied details in quote below from http://aws.amazon.com/free/
"AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**"

You need to give credit card details, even though we are only after a free tier account.

You will get an automated phone call where you type in the the PIN that gets displayed on the screen to verify your identity.

A good article of setting this up can be found in .net magazine (issue 218 summer 2011 pp 100-102)

We now need to give the 'bucket' which is where we place our site. So I clicked on create bucket on the left hand side and gave it a name I choose www.sustainability.net and selected location Ireland (it was the nearest option).











I have ended up http://www.sustainability.net.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/




To up-load the files I used the Enhanced Uploader (a Java based application) that is available as an option when you click on the upload tab. It allows Files and Folders to be upload to maintain the structure of the site. Click on Set Permissions to set the premissions and tick the Make everything public options and the upload.


If you want to see how the site looks click on the link: http://www.sustainability.net.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/




This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ and http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/




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