I need a small server, that gives me root access, which I will need to install debian on. It will mainly be used as a git server and a mail-server. This would be mainly for personal use (teamwork in small dev-groups). Does it make sense to use amazon's services for this? Or does this only make sense when using it to host large (enterprise scale) projects?
6 Answers
If you want to try out AWS then I'd try a t1.micro
in this case. Allows you to dip into cloud computing at a low price (free). :)
What may be especially interesting for you (and others), recently Amazon added a free tier: http://aws.amazon.com/free/
And if the need for more capacity arises, you're already there.
Can Amazon EC2 be used to do what you want: Yes.
Does it make sense in your case: I'd personnaly say no.
For personal use, get yourself a cheap VPS. Having root access, you can do whatever you want with it, they will be powerfull enough to run your git-server and mail-server and they are a lot cheaper than an always on EC2 instance (I have a personnel VPS doing similar things for 3$/month). Specs of the server will be a lot less impressive though, but you won't need it for your purpose anyway.
I often check out lowendbox.com to get some cheap deals on VPS servers...
Amazon, Slicehost, Peer1, Datapipe, Logicworks, Carpathia ... these should all fit the needs for what you are looking for and provide scalability for growth down the road.
best of luck!
You can use EC2 for this kind of thing. A 4 core, 16GB instance will cost you about $500/month. So it might not work out cost-effective for you, but it is damn good.
The biggest bugbear I've got so far, is only being able to attach a single Elastic IP to an instance.
The Micro instance might be powerful enough to do what you want, and will cost significantly less.
It would work, but something like Slicehost might meet your needs at a better pricepoint with the features you require.
This is quite different from what you asked but it might be okay just to use github for project hosting. This way you don't actually have to worry about managing server. Just a thought.