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I have a few clients who I host websites for. Right now I am using a web hosting reseller package to do this, but have been considering moving to Amazon EC2. The only problem is the clients need unique IP addresses because they need their own SSL certs.

The web hosting company I used also strangely had regions, such as us-east1 us-central, etc and so I wonder if they are using Amazon EC2 for their backbone - I'm guessing they are.

However as most of us know currently Amazon EC2 only allows you to have 1 elastic IP per instance, except in virtual private cloud where you are allowed to have 2.

I know of two workarounds that allow multiple SSL certs on EC2: Either use different port numbers or set up an Elastic Load Balancer for each host and point it to the same ec2 instance.

Neither of these seems that great - the first is funky (weird urls) and the second looks like it possibly costs around $15/mo for each load balancer.

A small reseller web hosting package runs around $25/mo, and each Amazon EC2 instance runs approximately $15/mo. I have 5 clients that I need to provide hosting for, and with the demonstrated math it does not seem feasible to use EC2 to host multiple sites for my clients.

Am I missing something, or is the big hosting company not really using Amazon EC2 after all?

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  • What is the name of the hosting company? Jan 30, 2012 at 19:31
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    EC2 doesn't have a "us-central" region. There are many other cloud providers - SoftLayer, RackSpace, etc. - and some of those do have datacenters that might be called "central".
    – ceejayoz
    Jan 30, 2012 at 20:05
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    Sounds like SoftLayer: Washington, Texas, Pennsylvania if I remember right. You can locate your server in the data center that gives you the best response time for your intended audience. Feb 23, 2012 at 4:47

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The web hosting company I used also strangely had regions, such as us-east1 us-central, etc and so I wonder if they are using Amazon EC2 for their backbone - I'm guessing they are.

Mamy cloud providers have multiple regions. Amazon EC2 doesn't have a us-central region (or anything that could be so-described). Other cloud hosts may - RackSpace and SoftLayer have Texas datacenters, I believe.

You can figure out who's hosting it by doing whois <ip address> (web interface: http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=IP_ADDRESS_HERE?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&ext=netref2).

It's possible to buy an SSL certificate good for many domains - this is how CloudFlare handles SSL - or the hosting provider they're using may just allow more than one IP per server (SoftLayer does this).

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  • how right you are! the hosting company is hostnine. looks like they do use SoftLayer as their backbone. thanks! :) ps: can you name any more besides SoftLayer and RackSpace?
    – mark
    Feb 5, 2012 at 19:47
  • MediaTemple is another big one. There are dozens of big public clouds and thousands of places offering VPSes.
    – ceejayoz
    Feb 5, 2012 at 19:55

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