CompleteFTP on Amazon EC2

Some of our customers may not be aware of how easy it is to run CompleteFTP on Amazon's EC2 cloud platform.

Amazon has been in the cloud business for a long time, and has vast experience in this area. The main advantages of using EC2 are the ease with which you can create, start and stop server instances, and the lack of long term commitment. You pay by the hour, and if you don't require a server for a particular period, you don't need to run it.

Setting up an instance is straightforward, and once security groups - Amazon's virtual firewall - are configured correctly, all you need to do is install CompleteFTP. We've just published a tutorial on the details which has been added to the User Guide.

We use EC2 extensively ourselves. When we test CompleteFTP's clustering, we use multiple EC2 instances. We have our own CompleteFTP file sharing server that we use to send files to customers, also hosted on Amazon.

Recently, we've gone live with our customer portal, which is also using CompleteFTP on EC2. In particular, it's utilizing our server-side Javascript technology (JSS), which allows web applications hosted in CompleteFTP to be written in Javascript. More details can be found here.

There are some drawbacks to using Amazon, of course. In some cases it may be more cost effective to use dedicated servers provided by a hosting service. You may get better performance, too. But for rapid creation of server instances and short-term commitment, Amazon is hard to beat.