Does anyone tryed to host bicoind on free Amazon AWS cloud?

[Lexiko]

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

Technical data:

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 and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
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**
In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

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?

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[scintill]

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?

[Lexiko]

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

Will see ...

Is this referring to general internet traffic from your AWS instances, or something like between AWS?

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.

[grue]

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

[Lexiko]

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.

[nibor]

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.

[nibor]

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.

[paybitcoin]

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

These free tiers are only available to existing AWS customers who have signed-up for Free Tier after October 20, 2010 and new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details). Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.

[Tulkas]

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

[grue]

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

[ThiagoCMC]

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

[finway]

Let me try this.

[stcupp]

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

[Lexiko]

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.

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

I'll think it will be enough.

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

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:

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 Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server 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*
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
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**

In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

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.

[grue]

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

[pointbiz]

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?

[Lexiko]

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

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

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?

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

[stcupp]

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

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

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?

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

<3 cron jobs

[scintill]

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 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.

[Lexiko]

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).