This has been my hesitation for doing any reserved instances. I expect to need larger instances in teh next 6 to 12 months, so any reserved instances I purchase today would have extra time on them without utilization ... This at least gives a way to ease the pain of reserving instances that you know you will out grow ...
I've been a long time proponent of CloudFlare. Usually they just speed things up and life is good. I've had a few minor problems where they 'clean up' some JavaScript and break it in the process, but those got resolved without any effort on my part within a few days.
I recently got an message from a client who has a business email blocked because of a Spamhaus SBL listing for CloudFlare. I know they have already responded to this at http://blog.cloudflare.com/thoughts-on-abuse, but my client is paying them for speeding up their website, not to get blocked by an anti-spam filter. I see both sides of this, but the bottom line is that if they don;t resolve the problem with Spamhuas they will start to loose business starting with mine.
I know the developer and I just let him know that he is getting attention here ... and to get a donation link up ASAP ... He is a good guy and this has been an awful experience for him ... I've told him to get an account and start posting to this thread, so hopefully he'll be here soon ...
Merely a 'Donate' button is not enough. It should show how much has been donated so far (it gives people more motivation to donate, if they see that this 'donate' thing actually works and for example, $1900 has been raised so far).
I've been moving my domain away for months as they expire ... I have a few that are ready to expire and I waited for today to do it ... Plus I'm going to move a few other important domains before the expire today ... The rest wilt have to wait till cash flow changes ...
I recently launched a B2B platform that required a VPN connection to each of my customers back end server running a proprietary software package on top of MSSQL. In order for my app server to have access to the client MSSQL server which was on a different computer than the VPN server itself I needed the advanced routing on AWS VPC ...
EC2 was enough for me to prototype my system to get 2 clients on board, but I needed VPC to accomplish the multiple VPN connections that I use ...
Also, my storage servers have no need to be addressable by my clients and/or the Internet at large. So while I could have done that with security groups, having them in a private subnet made things much easier ... and now I know that from an IP level the file storage cannot be found from outside of my VPC.
I'm sure if I sat down and thought about it I would come up with more ...
I use 3 Flip cameras to create a video podcast for my church each week. I'm not going for great quality, I'm going for good enough with a simple form factor and and ease of use. This is really disappointing and after what they did to Linksys I'll reconsider any product that I use or am looking at using after Cisco buys them ...
Yeah, those and WiseGeek for me. I keep on getting WiseGeek in searches (especially if I search for a question, which I occasionally do) and the content is complete and utter crap.
I've been working on an e-commerce project for a client that ended up having some major issues with database imports and the client wanted results now. Anyway, we got all of the items online and in Google with sitemaps, but the links were orphans ... You could find them in the built in site search and from a Google search, but not through any link path ...
After about 2 or 3 months like this we started to see the traffic going down and the item pages were getting de-indexed.
Since we fixed the import (and internal politics) problem (about 6 months after de-indexing) we have seen a steady increase in traffic again and the number of indexed pages is going up slowly ... very slowly ...
My take on this experience is that you need to have some sort of click-able link path to get to your content or any gains you might get from a sitemap will be taken away ... Sitemaps might get your pages crawled faster, they may even get into the index faster .. .but to keep them there you need good site structure ...
