x-pose.org » amazon http://x-pose.org Tech Geek and Web Developer Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:17:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Amazon Route 53 Benchmark Comparisonshttp://x-pose.org/2011/02/amazon-route-53-benchmark-comparisons/ http://x-pose.org/2011/02/amazon-route-53-benchmark-comparisons/#comments Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:22:05 +0000 brant http://x-pose.org/?p=228 It’s been a few months now since Amazon Route 53 was released to the public.  Some of you may have forgotten about it, while others are hesitant to change their DNS servers because there may not be much upside to it.  Lucky for you, I couldn’t help myself and jumped on board within the first week of it being released.  I have never experienced any DNS issues since the switch and from my untrained eye, things seemed to be more consistent.  But what I really wanted was a reliable Amazon Route 53 benchmark to prove it.

Here is a DNS benchmark comparison of FantasySP.com provided by indeep76.com.  Below you’ll see how much of an improvement Route 53 makes from various locations:

During the last 2-3 months using Amazon Route 53, the DNS lookups are more consistent and more reliable, not only from the USA, but all over the world.  Depending on your current nameserver’s reliability, your results may vary.  Use indeep76 to check or use a monitoring service like mon.itor.us or pingdom to give you a nice baseline.  If you are getting anything close to 200ms + response times, then there is room for improvement.  If you want to use Route 53 on your domain, then head over to dns30 and make sure to have your Amazon AWS API keys handy.  It’s a simple setup and will make your site that much faster.

Sound like too much work for not enough payoff?  Scared of changing nameservers and risking your site be unaccessible?  I don’t blame you.  However, I will say that if you are obsessed about page speed and have already optimized your site via gzip compression, minification, JS packing, and a CDN, then optimizing your DNS lookup time is your final step.

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]]> http://x-pose.org/2011/02/amazon-route-53-benchmark-comparisons/feed/ 4 amazonaws.com AKA Amazon EC2 is Being Abusedhttp://x-pose.org/2010/02/amazonaws-com-aka-amazon-s3-is-being-abused/ http://x-pose.org/2010/02/amazonaws-com-aka-amazon-s3-is-being-abused/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:45:14 +0000 brant http://x-pose.org/?p=86 Have you recently discovered a long list of amazonaws.com IPs listed in your websites stats and wondered what’s it for?  I was under the assumption that if I saw those IPs it’d probably be good news because I thought Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud had reputable clients.  It turns out that Amazon’s EC2 is a breeding ground for bad and abusive bots.

The Amazon EC2 website describes their service as:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

While all that sounds lovely, what they really could use is some quality control.  Have a look at this thread over at webmasterworld describing a long list of complaints and abusive IPs.  One particular nasty bot is hammering my site as well:

ec2-174-129-122-146.compute-1.amazonaws.com – 339,583 hits – 15.95 GB

You read that correctly, the bot has taken up nearly 16 gig, and it’s only been 11 days worth.  There are so many bots out there that eat up bandwith and resources that we have no choice but to block them.  I wish we could find out who these IPs are working for so we know who to really blame.

Until then, block amazonaws abusive bots:

deny from 67.202.0.0/18 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 72.44.32.0/19 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 75.101.128.0/17 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 79.125.0.0/18 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 174.129.0.0/16 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 184.72.0.0/15 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 204.74.108.0/24 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 204.236.128.0/17 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”
deny from 204.74.108.0/24 “Amazon ec2-Cloud”

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