eLink Lite migrated to Amazon's Cloud Service

An update on our eLink Lite service, where we use Cloud Hosting and open source software to provide a lower cost hosted eLink service to our customers.

Originally we set this service up on a cloud hosting service called Flexiscale. At the time we launched this service this was the only provider that would support Windows Server operating systems. We need Windows Server to run some of our key server side programs. However, this provider proved to be unreliable, with server images often corrupting and needing to be rebuilt from backups frequently.

Many months ago now Amazon's EC2 cloud hosting service started supporting Windows Server operating system images. We gave it a few months to bed in and then we started testing our service hosted on Amazon. First impressions were that it was more reliable, and also considerably faster in use. We migrated all our eLink Lite users to this service two months ago now and the reliability since then has been rock solid.

The Amazon service is more expensive than the Flexiscale service (particularly as we use their Europena hosting rather than their US based hosting) but has proved to provide our customers with a better service.