Do the small ec2 instances have the same performance problems as the micros? I just told my boss the other day I wasnt comfortable usings micros in production. Surely the smalls perform better?
Micros are really a completely different class from smalls and larges, because they offer "burst" performance. You shouldn't run anything in production on a micro, unless it's non-critical and not public-facing. Perhaps a 100% static web site, although even that I'm not sure about.
They can be appropriate for production workloads. You just need to understand the consequences of that burst performance. You also need to understand that you'll hit the invisible CPU usage limit without any notice.
You can actually run static web site from S3. Its really easy to setup, you can point your domain at a public S3 bucket. I put together this small website (http://www.de-encode.com/) to play around with it, seems to work well.
Yes they perform better. Benchmark it. But, if you plan on using a few instances that'll be on all the time, and none of the more advanced features....you'll get much better performance, for less, by using someone else. For small setups, Linode and DigitalOcean tend to be much loved (and Hetzner if latency to Europe isn't an issue).
Yeah I have some Linode, Rackspace and DigitalOcean servers, and yes they all seem to be a lot faster than the tiny EC2 instances. Never tried a small EC2 though.
