Multiple Amazon Elastic IP’s, Single Instance

Posted in Hosting by DB

I recently blogged about Amazon’s Elastic IP offering and how this would impact Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. By addressing one of the more pressing issues with EC2, Amazon has shown that it is willing to listen to their users and with the release of the Elastic IP and Availability zone features, Amazon will see a far greater acceptance of their EC2 platform.

That said, I would still like to see one more addition/enhancement to the Elastic IP feature. I believe by doing this Amazon will see a far greater rollout of their computing cloud vision.

Don’t get me wrong, Elastic IP’s are great and much needed. Moreover Amazon gives you by default 5 Elastic IP’s to use per account with the option of increasing it to a 100. The key constraint though is that you can use only one Elastic IP per instance. So if I had to use all my allocated 100 then I would need to have a hundred instances running. At about $75/month for every small instance running 24/7 I would be looking at close to $8000 each month with all associated costs thrown in.

What I would like to see is the ability to associate more than one Elastic IP’s to one single instance. Many of the applications that I deal with or write do not get traffic that would justify a separate instance but it is important for me to run each application on a separate IP address and not use a shared one. I believe there are quite a few developers and hosts out there that simply love the fact that they can use Amazon’s infrastructure for their hosting needs but the same infrastructure quickly becomes expensive when you try to host all your websites and applications especially if each require a separate IP Address.

While they acknowledge that this is how things stand as of today, that statement itself gives me hope that they are indeed working on making this more flexible and open. I cannot wait for this feature to be available as I will for sure start moving more and more websites from my current hosting account onto Amazon EC2 and S3 platform.

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5 Responses

  1. Neal Clark Says:
    December 16th, 2008 at 3:17 am

    i don’t know when this was published, cause i can’t seem to find a datestamp for the entry on this page.

    that said, it’s now 12/08. i haven’t been able to find additional information on this topic (allocating multiple elasitc IPs to a single instance). does anyone out there in the internets know if this is possible (i don’t think it is), or planned?

    thanks dudes.

    -neal

  2. Robert Xiong Says:
    January 12th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

    I have been waiting for this multi-IPs for one instance features for a while. It would be a great addition to what Amazon can already offer. It would make cloud computing a lot more attractive for large instances.

  3. Mauricio Says:
    July 18th, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    I join the ranks of potential customers waiting for this feature before AWS is usable to me.

  4. s0na Says:
    December 14th, 2009 at 11:31 am

    Correct me if I am wrong, but does it really matter if you have 1 elastic ip or 100’s of ips tied to one instance, if you can still run multiple websites on a single instance from 1 ip? Just have your web server (apache/iis) resolve the one ip to different named hosts on your single instance.

  5. Ashish Says:
    December 29th, 2009 at 9:53 am

    @s0na
    You may still need this feature if you want to setup IPBased Virtual hosts on you apache.
    IPBased Virtual hosting is sometimes required ex. you want to host different websites each having its own SSL certificate.

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