How to choose cloud server ECS

Are you still struggling to find a suitable cloud vendor and suitable servers to deploy the websites and programs you develop? This article will teach you to choose a suitable ECS in Alibaba Cloud in an easy to understand way. This article is suitable for college students and individual developers.

When I was a sophomore, I came into contact with Alibaba Cloud ECS. At that time, I didn't know much about Linux system operation. I often used it together with the pagoda panel, where I could easily install some software and environments. At that time, I built my own git repository to complete code collaboration with my classmates. Later, I made a personal network disk and backed up some important files to my own network disk. I think college students need to have a cloud server, where they can create many interesting and useful things.

A few days ago, I purchased a 1-core 2G cloud server and prepared to install the LAMP environment to build a blog. I will update some technical articles on the blog. I have gradually mastered the use of ECS, which has greatly helped my current work. I am currently a senior intern in the company, and one of the things I am doing is helping the company go to the cloud.

ECS instances owned

ECS based development practice project

Why recommend ECS? Because cloud servers eliminate the initial preparation for purchasing IT hardware, they allow you to use the server as easily and efficiently as using water and electricity, achieving instant use and elastic scaling of computing resources. Alibaba Cloud is the first and leading cloud service provider to enter the cloud computing field in China. The high availability, security, and elasticity of Alibaba Cloud's ECS instances are unmatched by building a computer room or purchasing physical servers. If you have not yet contacted cloud servers, it is strongly recommended that you give them a try, and there are many free trial activities.

Choosing a server mainly depends on selecting the appropriate combination of IT resources such as vCPU cores, memory, storage, and network bandwidth based on the business scenario and corresponding resource requirements. Of course, resiliency is a major advantage of ECS. We can increase the number of servers or improve the configuration of servers to achieve second level capacity expansion in case of sudden business incidents. Below, I will recommend some suitable cloud servers for college student groups and individual developers based on my own experience.

College Student Groups

If you are a college student, I would recommend you to participate in the Alibaba Cloud Apsaras Acceleration Program (because it is through which I became associated with ECS). It provides college students with free 2.5 months of ECS, completes student certification for Alibaba Cloud accounts, and completes the novice preparation camp to receive free ECS.

A 2-core 2G1M cloud server is provided for college students for free. We can use this configured cloud server to learn some basic Linux commands. Compared to using local virtual machines to learn Linux operations, using ECS is more convenient and interesting, saving many complicated and tedious installation steps on virtual machines in the past. Alibaba Cloud Cloud ECS can reset the system in a few minutes through the console, If a configuration modification error occurs, you can also directly rollback to the state of the previous snapshot. I strongly recommend that college students experience ECS for free, which is very friendly to our student users and reduces the cost and burden that our students want to develop. Activity link: Feitian Acceleration Program - College Students Practice at Home

Personal Developer Friend

For individual developers, you can participate in the Feitian Acceleration Program - Developer Growth Program to receive relevant product discounts.

When purchasing an ECS, we need to select the server's geographical availability, specification instances, operating system, hard disk size, bandwidth size, security group, and other configurations. New users can own products such as the ECS shared n4 and the ECS burst performance t6 with only a few dozen pieces a year.

In terms of geographical selection, Alibaba Cloud has provided us with dozens of regions at home and abroad. Personally, I suggest choosing regions that are close to customers; If it is for your own use, choose a region that is close to you.

Select architecture and instance specifications. Currently, Alibaba Cloud x86 computing provides instance specifications such as general-purpose, computational, memory, big data, high-frequency, shared, and enhanced. There are many instances of Alibaba Cloud specifications, and if it is difficult to choose, in fact, Alibaba Cloud has recommended corresponding specifications based on the application scenario. You can view the following: Cloud Documentation

The following are my recommendations for some ECS configuration parameters and scenarios:

Configuration Recommendations

Application Scenario

1 core 2G

For learning Linux operations, the Alibaba Cloud image market provides a variety of different Linux hairstyles. It can also be used to build personal blogs and expand their capacity when the traffic increases in the future.

2-core 4G

Used to build personal online disks and personal cloud notes. It can also be used for Web program testing, or to learn common environment configuration knowledge such as LAMP.

4-core 8G

Establish an online programming environment, OA system, and ERP system. It is suitable for e-commerce platforms with high traffic, or with video introductions and live shopping, as well as enterprise websites with large traffic and providing a large number of product demonstrations and video introductions.

8-core 16G

Used for large-scale development, high-performance data computing, in-depth learning, and data analysis. Comprehensive portal, information, and event promotion websites suitable for high concurrency data processing.

Select an operating system. We can choose the corresponding operating system based on our online environment, or we can choose an operating system through image marketing, custom image, and other methods.

Finally, select the hard disk and bandwidth according to actual needs.

Alibaba Cloud provides many special packages with different specifications for new ECS users, covering shared, general-purpose, burst performance, and memory models. Some can be purchased for as little as a few tens of yuan. As individual developers, they need a cloud server to accompany them on their way to learning technology.