Bitcoin Forum

Amazon cloud services gives some free VPS service , so it is great place to host bictoind daemon.

Technical data:
http://aws.amazon.com/free/

I made an free micro instance with Debian 6 server, hosting bitcoind , it works!
But I worrying about 1 million I/Os month limit. Bitcoind can exceed this limit, because there are a lot of disk writes to database.
Does anyone used Amazon EC2 as a bitcoind hosting ? Is is very interesting to see usage statistics.

Does any settings to reduce disk i/o by bitcoind ? F.e. enlarge database flush time?

As long as the I/O is within the instance (local disk), I think it wouldn't count against that limit.

I wonder if "15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services" would be more likely to be a problem.  Is this referring to general internet traffic from your AWS instances, or something like between AWS?

Will see ...

Bitcoind runs as a complete bitcoin node (realtime block download without generation), also it used as RPC server. So trafic is standard in/out internet traffic.

how would you install bitcoin? do you get shell access?

Of course I have ssh access. Amazon cloud is like regular VPS server. You can install any OS on it (even windows, if you can put it on 10Gb free space, or you can buy as much as necessary disk space).
I prefer Debian 6 x64, so I installed it.
i just copied bincond (executible) and .bitcoind (database), made bitcoind.conf and run bitcoind like a daemon.

So I can connect to my daemon from my php script. And it's totally free and secure.

AWS gives you really go stats on an hourly basis. So if you look in your account you should see the i/o's you are using per hour and do a simple bit of maths!
Do not think it will be a problem though.

Is good to know if you can run for free.

As if the network ever gets short of nodes that allow incoming connections a post on this forum and a few hundred members opening a free account would fix issues.

So please run for a month are report back on how close to io/bandwidth limits you get.

It's only free for 1 year after the AWS sign up, but still a good resource for a free VPS!

I have one running for tests for more than 4 months. Never exceeded the i/o limit (or any other).

what about the 15 gb bandwidth cap? is that enough?

Do not forget to host your ~/bitcoin directory within EBS persistent storage volume!!!

Let me try this. ;D

Read this:
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/08/01/third-largest-bitcoin-exchange-bitomat-lost-their-wallet-over-17000-bitcoins-missing/

sounds like a bad idea this pool lost over 17,000 coins using a amazon EC2 server

And what? They are were too stupid to put all eggs in one basket. You need to do wallet backup whatever hosting you would not have used.
Amazon is very stable comparing to other providers.

I'll think it will be enough.

Hm, interesting, how you made this? Can I see your bitcoin.conf file?

According to my Amazon day stats, bincoind daemon used:
~300,000 i/o (Month free limit 2,000,000 iops, overhead will costs 0,10$ per 1,000,000)
0.03 GB bytes in (Month free limit 15Gb)
0.041 GB bytes out (Month free limit 15Gb)
CPU 24 Hrs (Month free limit 720 Hrs)

As you see it will be only io limit exceeding aprox. 4КК iops, that will costs only 40 cents per month. :) So you can host your bitcoind for 5$ per first year.

Next years you will pay (per year):
Light Micro Instance   $23
2.5 Gb month bandwidth (1Gb Free + 1.5 Payed) -  $0.12*1.5*12=2$;
10Gb EBS storage $0.10*10Gb*12Month=12$
Iops $0.10*9KK*12Month=11$

So 1 year bitcoind hosting on Amazon wil costs 23+2+12+11=48$, it's about 4$ per month. It's cheap enought!

Btw, the limits has changed:

Now you can host windows first year for free! So you can host your bitcon client there (with local wallet.dat backup), for urgent remote payments.

maybe we should make a daemon that flushes IO less often, and keep more stuff in ram :p

Ok interesting....

I don't think you should dismiss the mistake the Polish exchange made. He was running on an EC2 which apparently is just for computing or CPU time. When those boxes go down, they wipe the data. That's how he lost his coins. Amazon has another cloud service for redundant distributed storage.

How do you propose to have a fault tolerant backup of your private key's if it's on an EC2?

I thought about it, I see no problem to implement this.

For example, once a minute/hour/day ... cronjob making an secure wallet.dat archive and coping it into safer place(s).

<3 cron jobs

I believe there is a way to backup your instance to more-redundant storage, but you do have to specifically do it.  I have also lost data in an instance failure (thankfully not anything too valuable.)  I think failures are pretty common, since they run the machines on cheapo hardware.

If somebody interesting , you can see the result here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60487.0
sample php script that using daemon, that hosted on Amazon Cloud (free account).