Ha! I knew I wasn't the only one.

I'm a large user of AWS but, in general, I never feel like I'm in a true VPS. My last experience:

Out of the sudden one of our EC2 instances could not connect to another, causing our HA solution to spun dozens of instances and eventually crash too. It was clear to me that the dest machine was behind some firewall, we went to the security group, the machine was supposed to accept any connection, from any port, any host. The instance itself had no active firewall.

Out of desperation I added the very own security group to itself. It worked for a few hours, then stopped again, I removed, it came back to work and still working (8+ months now)

This is only one of various mysterious events I've seen happening on AWS.

For EC2 security groups you have to open access to both the correct ports and protocols. Ports are a concept at layer 4 of the OSI model, while ping, or more correctly 'ICMP Echo Request', is lower down the TCP/IP stack at layer 3. So when configuring the security group, look for the option to choose Protocols, then enable ICMP :)

Thanks. This is exactly the kind of stuff that I could learn from said blog post, and why I think "EC2 == VPS" is false.

The documentation I was following made no mention of this at all.

> I have no idea, just things don't work on EC2.

A raw EC2 instance is identical to your average VPS offering. You don't have to use all the extra alphabet soup of ELB, SQS, SNS, SES, etc.

> When it came time to ping the server... no response.

What were your security group settings? ICMP (ping, traceroute, etc.) are blocked by default, you have to enable them.

> A raw EC2 instance is identical to your average VPS offering.

See, you say that, but then you later say

> What were your security group settings?

I dunno, man, I just want a server. Every other VPS provider works, and I can set up my own iptables etc.

I'm not saying EC2 is _bad_, as I'm sure things being extra mega locked down by default is good overall. But I don't think it's fair to say that EC2 is the same as a VPS.

The solution to your problem was one Googling for "AWS ping" away, and I've had more significant setup differences between two VPS providers than having to configure the AWS firewall to allow pings.

EC2 fits every definition of VPS I've ever seen.

At that point, I had already been googling for so long that giving up was the best decision. Also, when I said 'ping' I meant 'hit via a web browser' as well as ping on the command line.

Furthermore, I don't feel very comfy when doing 'sysadmin via Google,' who knows what stuff I'm screwing up?

I had never used Digital Ocean before. But getting going with them was the exact same as my previous Linode, Rackspace Cloud, prgmr.com, and every other VPS provider I have tried. I don't need to install special command line tools, or set up security groups, or generate .pems... I ask for a server, they send me an email with a password, I log in, change it, and set up my ssh prefs. Super easy, using the same stuff I use everywhere else.

The big difference between traditional VPS and IaaS services like EC2 (or Google Compute Engine, etc.) is that the latter has dynamic scaling (and a pricing model built around the assumption that you will use dynamic scaling) as a core feature; for traditional VPS-style work on an IaaS, you are likely to end up paying a premium for flexibility you aren't using (and possibly dealing with some attendant management complexity from the same source), but, other than that, IaaS should be a complete substitute for VPS.