This Friday my SheevaPlug suddenly died. All that was left was a device with the green blinking LED. Nothing worked, including the serial interface, which should always work. Searching the web, it turns out this is a problem with the power supply (PSU). Apparently it happens more often. My SheevaPlug was still under warrenty, so NewIT will replace the it. Unfortunately, the new PSU is not available until January. So what to do with all the sites that I run on my SheevePlug’s web server?

I decided to use Amazon EC2. You can place your own virtual server in Amazon’s cloud. When you sign up, you get one micro server for free. Such a micro server is even a little bit faster than the SheevaPlug, so that it an added bonus. Because you run your own server, you can choose whatever OS you want (I choose Debian, only Lenny was available though), and you can set it up the way you want it. So it was an easy process of copying all the data and configuration files to the new server. Within a couple of hours, the web server was up and running again. There seems to be some cost to data transfer out from the server (so for every web request). But it is a ridiculous low $0.01 per GB. After two days I used 7 MB, so I’ll take a while before I have to pay 2 cents.

It’s not all bad, because when I had to set up a new server, I could use my own articles. I could updated some articles, to include extra information, or correct some errors.

Update 1: First problem found. Hotmail refuses all mail sent from Amazon EC2 servers, because the IP range is listed in Spamhaus’ Policy Block List. So you would need to use an external SMTP relay host.

Update 2 (28 December): I received a new PSU from NewIT today. Installing this was easy. The SheevaPlug is now working again. Very quick response from NewIT.