Still looking, searching, reading for some way to have good, decent and often backups of the machine because if the power goes down or something happens, when the instance goes down .. you lose the data inside the instance.

Saw that there are threads about this on amazon's aws ec2 forum. Amazon's staff say that they are thinking about this and how they could provide either a database service (mysql or something else) or some kind of really useful and permanent storage (like the 160GB /mnt partition, but that doesn't wipe when your instance goes down).

The service that is already available and everybody is expecting to provide persistent storage is Amazon's S3 ( Simple Storage Service ). It's kind of a huge and cheap storage service, a walkthrough is available here. The problem for the time being is that there are no stable linux implementations.

So i installed Debian Sarge on Amazon's EC2 service.

The thing is, Amazon doesn't give you a static ip address or dns name ... so either use a dynamic dns service (something like no-ip, dyndns or any other one) or do your own thing.

I chose to do my own, and found this piece of software . They offer a service too, but i used only the software and installed the daemon on another machine i use (outside amazon). Though Debian Sarge has Dhis in the package collection, it's an older release which doesn't work with bind9 so i had to install from source.