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At my company we are looking at hosting a blog and a CMS . We are still in the process of building the product and havent made it live yet. We are looking at some hosting options. We need to have complete root shell access to the system .So, i have the following two questions.
1.) Should we go for Amazon EC2 or VPS, considering our present requirements which i stated above and also considering that we may need to scale in the future ?
2.) If VPS is the way to go for us,could you please recommend some good service.Also which plan should we go for and also how much would it cost ?
Thank You.
Disclosure: I used to work for Linode.
Speaking objectively, I've heard from several customers that have migrated both from EC2 (as well as to EC2) that say Amazon EC2 is a bit difficult to work with for hosting Web services. From the cost per resource to the various quirks of their service -- last I heard, EC2 is designed more for utility computing than running a Web site and its associated services. I would recommend EC2 more for these kinds of applications:
Processing videos and other multimedia.
Throwaway computing, where nodes are added and removed as demand goes up and down.
Any service where CPU is the bottleneck.
A VPS is a much better choice for you, as you get root and -- if a company does its VPS service right -- scaling is ridiculous easy. If you plan for scalability from the get go with a load balancing solution, you can add a node with Linode in under a few minutes.
The two front runners in the VPS market are Slicehost and Linode. Each have their advantages and disadvantages. Again speaking objectively, Linode's cost per resource is better than Slicehost's, and Linode offers a few services Slicehost does not. Both have fairly active and helpful communities, and both are reliable services. Here's a comparison of both where Linode was ultimately chosen, and a discussion on Slicehost's forums with customers taking both sides.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have, on StackExchange or off.
Go with Linode. You won't regret it. I was a customer long before I was hired.
Another thought I just had is that it's unwise to put all your eggs in one basket; I recently completed full support for the wonderful libcloud project, and Slicehost is fully supported as well, as is EC2. Regardless of what platform you choose, management tools are catching up with cloud ideals.
EC2 is only reasonable if you plan on taking advantage of the scaling. With your dev server, I'm sure you're going to want it up at all times, and with that I think the cheapest instance is like $70 a month at amazon.
Just got for Linode. Great community and all that for only $20/mo.
While I agree with other answers that EC2 is more for data processing than web hosting, I found that now EC2 offers free micro-instances for one year and you may sign up for one and play with it yourself and see which is the best option for you.
If you're not planning on scaling up and down on a regular basis I would recommend a VPS. Jed Smith mentioned two options for that and another choice for a VPS is http://prgmr.com/xen/ which I've used and am happy with. They don't offer as many options as Slicehost or Linode, but they offer more RAM per dollar than most other providers I've seen. They also don't offer any wizards or ajax console access or other high level features. However, if you're ok with setting everything up via a command line console they are an option you should consider.
I have been using https://www.atum.com for years. I was with Amazon, it just didn't cut it for my needs. We have a lot of ram and disk requirements, I found the IO/RAM to be quite bad.
I used Linode for a while, they were quite good as well. I went to Atum mainly because of a friend who was with them, had good things to say about the performance. I have a lot of customers in Canada and that is where there datacenter is because of the patriot act, it had to be in Canada so. Atum VPS has been great so far to me =)
We have been using vps.net for a while and quite satisified with it.
I love linode's offerings as well though I haven't used it yet.
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I have a couple of different projects running for the moment - some PHP apps and a few WordPress instances, which all currently are kept at a web hosting company. The contract period time is about to end and I would lie if I wouldn't say that I really had considered making the switch onto a VPS server in the cloud with the prices getting really great.
I am totally in love with the fact of being able to turn the performance up or down when demand increases, or goes away and thereby cut the costs.
With my background as a PHP developer, with only a little hint of Linux (ubuntu) knowledge, I am thoroughly concerned about the security if I should run my own VPS.
Sure, I am able to install and get things running with my current knowledge (and some help by Google), but is it realistic nowadays to expect that my server (LAMP, really) will stay secure by running out-of the box stuff and keeping it up-to date?
Thanks
Maintaining your server is just one more thing to worry about, and if you're a developer, your focus should probably be on development. That said, it needs to make financial sense to go the managed route. If you're just working on toy projects (I've got a $20/month VPS that I use for my personal projects and homepage, and it's pretty hands-off) or if you're just getting off the ground, VPSes have the great advantage of being cheap and giving you lots of control of your environment. You can even mitigate some of the risk by keeping aggressive backups, since it's easy to redeploy a server quickly.
But, if you get to the point where it won't affect your profitability to do so, you probably should seriously consider getting someone else to take care of infrastructure for you either by buying managed hosting services or hiring someone to do it for you. It all depends on what you can afford to lose if you get rooted and how much time you can afford to invest in server management and recovery as opposed to coding.
I wouldn't. We did the same thing because the non-managed VPS are sooo cheap, but unless you really need to install applications or libraries that are not part of standard shared host setups, in my experience, being a pure developer as well, the time spent is never worth it.
Unless, of course, it is your own tiny blog or you just want to play around.
But imagine you (or whichever automation you use) update php, and for some reasons it fails (or worse, you render your current installation unusable) - are you good enough to handle this? And if so, how long will it take you? Do you have a friend at hand who can help?
We, as a small company, are getting rid of our VPSs step-by-step and moving back to our reseller package, hosted at a good hosting provider.
Good question, though.
As for security, I have successfully used Amazon EC2 for a number of things. It's not the cheapest around, but quite comprehensible in shared data stores between instances, connection to S3, running hosts at different hosting centers etc, grouping hosts in different clusters, etc etc.
They have a firewall built in, where you can turn all things off except say, TCP traffic on port 22 for SSH and 80 for web. That combined with something like Ubuntu, where you can easily run updates without worrying much about breakage, is probably all you need from a security point of view.
You need consider cloud computing as a statement of avaibility, not cost. You can be seriously surprised about the cost at the end.
I already have optioned to use VPS hosting. Good VPS hosting is costly, these days you may find cheap dedicated host compared to VPS. Have look at hivelocity.com – I like their services.
About security, most VPS host company takes care of security for you at the infra-structure level, and some may use antivirus software on files. On dedicated host, you need to take care by yourself or contract managed support services: a tradoff.
LAMP server is cheap everywhere. You can hire a private VPS and have some security, you may count on services like DNS hosting too – this is trouble to configure. VPS can be your first step as you're doubtful and has no experience on hosting. Thereafter when you find out the advantages of having your own server, you'll migrate straight to dedicated server.
What is acceptable from a security standpoint will differ depending on the people involved, what you want to secure and requirements of the product/service.
For a development server I usually don't care so much, so I usually do some basic securing of the server and then don't pay attention to it again. My main concern is more of someone getting a session and using my cycles to run something. I don't normally care about IP so that's not a concern for me.
If I'm setting up a box that has to meet Sarbanes-Oxley, Safe Harbor, or other PII/PCI standards I must meet I would probably go managed just because I don't want the additional security work load.
Somewhere in between is a judgment based on if I want to commit the required time to secure the server to the level I want it secured at. If I don't want to do it myself I pay someone to do it.
I would be careful about assuming your getting a certain level of security just because your paying someone to manage your server. I've come across plenty of shops where security is really an afterthought.
If I understood you correctly, you are considering a move from a web host to a VPS, and wonder if you have the skills to ensure the OS remains secure now that it's under your control?
I guess it's an open-ended question. You are moving from a managed environment to an unmanaged environment, and whether you maintain your environmental security is up to you. If you're running your own server then you need to make sure that default passwords aren't in use (for the database, OS and any services on top), patches are quickly identified and applied, host firewalls are configured properly and suspicious activity alerts are immediately sent to you. Hang on, does your current web host do any of this for you? Without details about your current web host and the planned VPS, you are pretty much comparing apples to oranges.
BTW, I would be somewhat concerned about my LAMP server security, but frankly I would be much more concerned about development errors (SQL injection, XSS) and the packages running on top of my server (default passwords + dev errors).
For a lamp stack, I would probably not do it. It would be a different case if you were using a Platform-as-a-service provider like Windows Azure - by my own experience there is minimal operational overhead and you just upload the app and it runs in a vm (and yes it supports php).
But for Linux there are no such providers that I know of, which means you will have to manage the Operating system, the app frameworks, the web server and anything else that you install on the instance. I wouldn't do it myself. I would consider the options as hiring a person with the relevant experience to do this for me vs the cost of managed services from the vps provider and go with one of those two.
Rather than give you advice about what you should do, or tell you what I would do, I'm just going to address your question "is it realistic nowadays to expect that my server (LAMP, really) will stay secure by running out-of the box stuff and keeping it up-to date?" The answer to this question, in my opinion, is basically yes.
dietbuddha is right, of course: what constitutes an acceptable level of security depends on the context, but for all but the most security-sensitive purposes, if you're using a current (i.e. supported) distro, with sane defaults, and keeping up with the security updates, then you ought to be fine.
I have two VPSs, each of them currently runs Ubuntu 10.04 server. On one of them, I spend some time installing and configuring tiger, tripwire, and taking various other security measures. On the other, I simply installed fail2ban and set security updates to automatic, and left it at that. They've been running for a few years, now, and I've had no problem with either.
You should do it for fun and for learning purposes. Other than that, don't; you're wasting your own time and a lot of other people's time.
I say this because I've wasted serious time setting up an EC2 instance to host my SVN server and a few other things. I mean, I loved setting everything up and messing w/ the server; I learned a lot especially because I'd never done anything a LINUX server before. However, looking back, I wasted a ton of time and had to keep buggin #Jordan S. Jones for help.
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What are the advantages and disadvantages of self-hosting something like a svn repository? All links and ideas are appreciated.
Off the top of my head:
Advantages of Self-hosting
Flexibility. On my own machine I can install whatever I want. If I would like to use a vcs like Bazaar and use Loggerhead instead of Trac, then right now there isn't really much choice beyond Launchpad, which has its warts
Save money. Costs add up over time especially for large teams
The free plans offered by sites like Assembla are not private. Anybody can have access to your code
Advantages of Paid hosting (ie: GitHub, Assembla, Google Code)
Robustness. You don't need to worry about your server catching fire because it's become somebody else's problem.
Less hassle. Don't need to be do all the system administration and tweaking of conf files. Instead you can just focus on the coding
For production you should only use self hosting if you are professional sys admin. Can you answer yes to following questions (a bit linux oriented, but you should get an idea):
Can you react to system failure in minutes (I mean you need sleep at least. Do you have somebody to look after system while you are asleep?)
Can you spot a system break?
Can you remove exploits from your system?
Can you recompile kernel. If you can't remove exploits?
Can you configure the system for optimal performance?
Are you willing to pay for UPS, backup storage and alternative internet provider?
If you can answer yes to these questions benefits are very atractive and I would go with it.
On the other hand hosting development environment can be managed by administrator of any level especially when there are such easy to use servers like Ubuntu.
You specifically asked about hosting a subversion repository, so the first disadvantage that comes to mind is data protection. I personally would never trust a third-party with my source code, except for open source code or code of an unimportant side project. Source code is a very important asset for a ISV, so trusting a third-party to protect your source code doesn't sound like a good idea.
And even if it's not about source code, outsourcing other critical parts of you business such as email, accounting/invoicing* is just asking for trouble. And it's not like you don't have to care about backups anymore when you outsource your data hosting. You still should backup your data, in case the hosting company screws up.
*) With outsourcing accounting/invoicing I mean all those new hosted invoicing apps, not getting help from an accountant of course
I find the web interface of external hosts to be hassles. Plus you can have however much space you want on your machine. Like you said, the maintenance can be a burden for self hosting though.
How big is your project? If it is not too big just get an account at http://www.beanstalkapp.com
That is what I did. I do not have to worry about any setups and can focus on the actual development.
If your situation is more complex self-hosting is worth considering. But keep in mind that you would have to take of backups too and that an update of the server screw a lot of things up.
This ties into the server catching fire, but one key advantage of external hosting is that it's (presumably) backed up automatically. Doing your own backups is a hassle, and ends up being less reliable than what you'd get from Google.
With self-hosting there comes great responsibility.
you have to backup everything
you need spareparts for your hardware
if you have stuff that is important you need redundant hardware
you don't have real holidays. if something breaks you have to fix it
In addition to what others have already mentioned, there are also benefits specific to using cloud services by companies like Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc.
Despite what some might claim, self-hosting is not inherently "safer." In most cases, it's quite the opposite actually. This is because most small-to-medium-sized companies do not have the resources to provide the level of reliability and redundancy that mega-corporations like Microsoft or Amazon can. Unless you are hosting source code for a top-secret defense project or other projects where the threat of espionage is very real, the greatest threats to your code and your business are more mundane things like server/network downtime.
Redundancy: Cloud services provide levels of redundancy that most businesses simply cannot obtain on their own. This includes data redundancy (back-ups/RAID), hardware redundancy (components/equipment), and geographical redundancy (multiple server locations across the globe). If a natural disaster hits your city, is your data going to be safe?
Multi-tenancy: Each small business by itself cannot afford 24/7 support staff and multi-million dollar equipment. But pooling their resources together through a Cloud service affords them (through centralization and better resource utilization/higher efficiency) access to a much higher level of service.
Security: Related to multi-tenancy, by centralizing the data of thousands of businesses, this allows security resources to be much more tightly focused.
Lastly, it should be noted that most commercial hosting providers offer co-location and dedicated hosting. And even cloud service providers allow customers to configure their "server" however they want, and installing/running whatever applications on it they want. So you can have a great deal more freedom than that offered by $10/month web hosting.
I have been doing some catching up lately by reading about cloud hosting.
For a client that has about the same characteristics as StackOverflow (Windows stack, same amount of visitors), I need to set up a hosting environment. Stackoverflow went from renting to buying.
The question is why didn't they choose cloud hosting?
Since Stackoverflow doesn't use any weird stuff that needs to run on a dedicated server and supposedly cloud hosting is 'the' solution, why not use it?
By getting answers to this question I hope to be able to make a weighted decision myself.
I honestly do not know why SO runs like it does, on privately owned servers.
However, I can assume why a website would prefer this:
Maintainability - when things DO go wrong, you want to be hands-on on the problem, and solve it as quickly as possible, without needing to count on some third-party. Of course the downside is that you need to be available 24/7 to handle these problems.
Scalability - Cloud hosting (or any external hosting, for that matter) is very convenient for a small to medium-sized site. And most of the hosting providers today do give you the option to start small (shared hosting for example) and grow to private servers/VPN/etc... But if you truly believe you will need that extra growth space, you might want to count only on your own infrastructure.
Full Control - with your own servers, you are never bound to any restrictions or limitations a hosting service might impose on you. Run whatever you want, hog your CPU or your RAM, whatever. It's your server. Many hosting providers do not give you this freedom (unless you pay up, of course :) )
Again, this is a cost-effectiveness issue, and each business will handle it differently.
I think this might be a big reason why:
Cloud databases are typically more
limited in functionality than their
local counterparts. App Engine returns
up to 1000 results. SimpleDB times out
within 5 seconds. Joining records from
two tables in a single query breaks
databases optimized for scale. App
Engine offers specialized storage and
query types such as geographical
coordinates.
The database layer of a cloud instance
can be abstracted as a separate
best-of-breed layer within a cloud
stack but developers are most likely
to use the local solution for both its
speed and simplicity.
From Niall Kennedy
Obviously I cannot say for StackOverflow, but I have a few clients that went the "cloud hosting" route. All of which are now frantically trying to get off of the cloud.
In a lot of cases, it just isn't 100% there yet. Limitations in user tracking (passing of requestor's IP address), fluctuating performance due to other load on the cloud, and unknown usage number are just a few of the issues that have came up.
From what I've seen (and this is just based on reading various blogged stories) most of the time the dollar-costs of cloud hosting just don't work out, especially given a little bit of planning or analysis. It's only really valuable for somebody who expects highly fluctuating traffic which defies prediction, or seasonal bursts. I guess in it's infancy it's just not quite competitive enough.
IIRC Jeff and Joel said (in one of the podcasts) that they did actually run the numbers and it didn't work out cloud-favouring.
I think Jeff said in one of the Podcasts that he wanted to learn a lot of things about hosting, and generally has fun doing it. Some headaches aside (see the SO blog), I think it's a great learning experience.
Cloud computing definitely has it's advantages as many of the other answers have noted, but sometimes you just want to be able to control every bit of your server.
I looked into it once for quite a small site. Running a small Amazon instance for a year would cost around £700 + bandwidth costs + S3 storage costs. VPS hosting with similar specs and a decent bandwidth allowance chucked in is around £500. So I think cost has a lot to do with it unless you are going to have fluctuating traffic and lots of it!
I'm sure someone from SO will answer it but "Isn't just more hassle"? Old school hosting is still cheap and unless you got big scalability problems why would you do cloud hosting?
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I'm looking for a cost effective tool for managing an web app on Ec2. Rightscale seems to the big dog and charges for it. Scalr looks like a more cost effective solution but it's hard to find out any real customer experiences..
The key aspects I'm looking for is a load balancer (http and https) and a way to automatically bring online additional web servers capacity as load increases as well as terminate the instances when load falls off.
From what I can tell, lots of people are rolling their own stuff here. We're trying to release an app and don't really want to have to fight too many heavy sys admin battles. Given the importance of performance etc I'd be grateful to hear advise and experiences from the field on this.
I am a Scalr user, a Scalr.net subscriber, and have become a Scalr enthusiast. I cannot possibly afford Rightscale.
Scalr can do what you ask.
Scalr has three images (each with 32/64 bit versions), plus a base (generic) image:
1) A load balancer image, running nginx. A highly available setup requires two of these. Scalr will manage your nameservice, and round robin between them. If one goes down, Scalr will remove it from DNS and bring up another instance. It is possible to run other load balancers, but nginx is the default.
2) Several application server images are available, running Apache/Tomcat/Rails. You setup your application here, be it PHP/Perl/Python/Java/Ruby/whatever. nginx routes requests between these instances grouped by unique user (based on IP + browser). Scalr monitors these for upness too, and replaces broken instances.
3) A MySQL database image, with automatic master/slave replication. Just deploy your schema, and Scalr handles replication and replaces defunct servers. It will also backup your data periodically. Scalr's DNS provides master and slave hostnames, so you can have your app read from the slaves and write to the master.
All of these instance types will auto-scale based on load. You start with the base image closest to what you're doing, and then you customize them for your application. For instance, we deploy our Perl/Catalyst app on the apache server instances but we serve static content from the nginx front-end servers. We had to modify our application slightly to use read/write database handles.
All in all, it took about three weeks of working through bugs in Scalr to get our application to a reliable state where I am confident that it IS highly available with Scalr. Their support was phenomenal, so the bugs didn't bother me too much, and the system is really coming along. It is approaching serious reliability.
As a side note, the best feature of Scalr is the 'Synchronize to All' feature, which auto-bundles your AMI and re-deploys it on a new instance - all without a service interruption. This saves you the time of going through the lengthy EC2 image/AMI creation process, which can otherwise make very simple admin tasks take 20 minutes. You can use this whether you are scaling your server farm or not - it would be very handy even on a single instance.
I pay Scalr.net $50 a month to host the service for me because I think it saves me time and money. The bottom line so far is this: at my last gig, we had a systems guy working on our highly available Linux DB + app server setup for a year... and he failed to achieve the kind of reliability that I achieved in three weeks. The savings by using Scalr as compared to rolling my own are extreme.
All that being said, if I could afford Rightscale, I would be using Rightscale. But the up-front fee and $500 a month make that impossible. There has been talk of waving the up-front fee in exchange for waving the consulting that it includes, but the monthly service fee isn't going anywhere.
I should mention that at the moment, sclar.net's website is down, so if I wanted to manage any of my server farms (don't have them up atm), I simply couldn't right now. It is not clear whether scaling is working for scalr.net subscribers right now, or not. Which is to say... this is perhaps not a mature solution yet. This doesn't happen often, before tonight the only downtime I've experienced were in periods of a few minutes at a time. But yeah... its down RIGHT NOW, so I must mention it :)
I would suggest a thorough reading of the support group at http://groups.google.com/group/scalr-discuss before making your decision. If you pick Scalr, be prepared to test your setup and work through any issues you have on the google group.
I will comment on your question, since giving a concrete answer is a little ambitious.
First, I see that you have haproxy on your tags. That is definitely the best load balancing software proven in EC2. There is documentation and experiences in the AWS forums on the use of haproxy.
I am unable to give you an opinion on scalr, but Rightscale is going the right direction. One of RightScale most interesting features in their roadmap is that they are a mgmt cloud system for any cloud not just EC2 of Amazon. That makes them very promising when trying to request load balancing and upscaling in need.
Also you can signup for a developer free account on rightscale and you can test some of their AMI and free scripts, they are pretty impressive.
Well, this might sound like I am working there or something, but I am a just a cloud user, no connection with them. If that crosses your mind.
I hope this helps, at least adds to the discussion.
Geo
Been on Scalr for about two months now and have slowly transitioned several production applications to the platform with good results. I strongly recommend them for quick turn around/support and value. I would like to see them improve availability of their platform.
All in all, a good fit for the original poster based on the simple use case presented.
Every service has a bad day. AWS services see down time. However, there are still users running their apps on AWS.
I have a few farms on Scalr.net and compared to Rightscale. I don't have to pay an arm and a leg.
Overall, service is very reliable. And now with the scripting engine i can setup my own scripts to govern my instances.
With Regards
Hareem Haque
Both services (rightscale and scalr) are great. The offer is not the same and the price is not the same too. But they are both what I was looking for. Regaring our budget scalr fits my needs. I found the support through a google group very strange at the beginning, but it is very fast and efficient.
Their solution is also open source (not bad) and they also have a V2 in their roadmap with support to other providers.
Wait and see, but til now, I'm very happy with it
Deciding on the right choice may not be as cut and dry as everyone expects. I have met with and heard talks from Scalr about their platform and have also listened to RightScale discuss their platform. If you have a simple SOA (App Server - Database Server - File Server), then either choice will be right for your company.
Ultimately, if you have created some custom middleware and you rely on known sockets or specific points for handshakes, you will need to consider load-balancing and auto-scaling what you can and fall back to your own solutions for what can't be managed with either of these services.
Some people say that automatic scaling won't solve the problem
I am looking into Scalr right now and although it all looks good, I decided to continue with my own scripting for the purpose of cloud management / scaling. I have 8 servers right now and am paying only the AWS fees. I use chef (self-hosted), nagios, and a lot of other tools. My databases are mysql and mongodb, load balancer is haproxy, app layer is rails. Until I need 100s of servers, I think I will just keep scriptin' ;-)
I am a broke college student. I have built a small web app in PHP5 and MySQL, and I already have a domain. What is an affordable way to get it online? A few people have suggested amazon's cloud services, but that seems equivalent to slitting my wrists and watching money slowly trickle out. So suggestions? Hosting companies, CIA drop sites, anything?
Update: A lot of suggestions have been for Dreamhost. Their plan allows for 5TB of bandwidth. Could anyone put this in perspective? For instance, how much bandwidth does a site with the kind of traffic StackOverflow get?
I say pay the 50-80 bucks for a real host. The classic "you get what you pay for" is very true for hosting. This will save you time, time you can spend getting those $80.
I use and recommend DreamHost for both their prices and customer service. I've hosted several sites here and performance has always been good. $5.95 a month for their basic package.
I highly recommend HostRocket. I have been with them for about 6 or 7 years now with multiple domains and have found uptime and database availability flawless. The only reason I'm leaving them is because I'm doing some .NET web apps now and HostRocket is purely LAMP based.
But without making things an ongoing ad. I will put in two "gotchas" that you'll want to be wary of when searching:
"Free" hosting services. Most of these will make you subdomain on them and worse, they'll put a header and a footer on your page (sometimes in gaudy frame format) that they advertise heavily on. I don't care how poor you are, this will not help attract traffic to your app.
A lot of the cheaper rates depend on pre-payment. HostRocket will give you $4.99 a month in hosting, but you have to pre-pay for 3 years. If you go month to month, it is $8.99. There are definitely advantages to the pre-payment, but you don't want to get caught with close to twice the monthly payment if you weren't expecting it.
I recently found a site called WebHostingStuff that seems to have a decent list of hosts and folks that put in their reviews. While I wouldn't consider it "the final authority" I have been using it as of late for some ideas when looking for a new host.
I hope this helps and happy hunting!
I have no specific sites to suggest, but a typical hosting company will charge you less than $10 per month for service. A simple Google search will turn up lots of results for "comparison of web hosts": http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=comparison+of+web+hosts&btnG=Google+Search
Well, Amazon EC2 is only as bad as the amount of traffic you get. So the ideal situation is to monetize your site (ads, affiliate programs, etc) so that that more traffic you get, the more you pay Amazon, but the more you make...in theory of course.
As for a budget of nothing...there's not really much you can do...hosting typically always costs something, but since you are using the LAMP stack, it's pretty cheap.
For example, hosting on GoDaddy.com for 1year can be about $50-60 which is not too bad.
I use dreamhost which costs about $80 per year, but I get MUCH more storage and bandwidth.
I agree with pix0r. With your requirements of php5 and mysql it seems that for starting out Dreamhost would be a good recommendation. You can always move it over pretty easily to ec2 if it takes off.
Dreamhost is great and cheap for a php5 mysql setup that gives you command line access. The problems come if you want to use some other web language/framework like RoR or Python/Django/Pylons. I know there are hacks to get things working, but last time I tried they were spotty at best and not supported by Dreamhost.
It may be helpful to know what kind of app we are talking about. Also what sort of traffic do you expect and to echo Adam's note what sort of business model (if any) do you have?
I've been at HostingMatters for years. They're relatively cheap, and their service is awesome. <12 hours for any support ticket I've ever had.
Additionally, since I've been with them for about ten years, they bumped me to an unmetered plan for no cost (at the same $10/month I was paying.) ....