amazon ec2 free server with persistent data

Question

I will install a website in the free EC2 from amazon but I read something not good: I have a simple website which uses a database. Users come inside my website and post information, send commetns... if for some reason the instance breaks or amazon shuts it down, will I lose all information posted in my website and database? All files users uploaded and information saved will be gone?

If so, why would someone use EC2 if you lose all your data if some problem happens, and because problems always happen, sometime I will certainly lose my data!

I know I can save an image of my current OS in AWS but do I need to save the image everytime a user posts something to my website? It's ridiculous. I know I am missing something here, but I looked into google and people all the time say I should use EBS but it's not in the free plan. So how is it good idea using AWS EC2 free plan if my data will always be at risk of being lost?

Answer 1

Typically you would want to use an EBS backed instance. Since the free tier does not support that, but does offer EBS storage, create your database on an EBS partition for data you cannot lose

30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

You should have a means to quickly launch a new instance, and you should back up the data on your EBS partition because EBS volumes can and do fail from time to time.

UPDATE

It seems that Micro instances are in fact EBS backed.

It is still advisable to attach a separate EBS volume, because it makes it much more convenient to backup the database (you create a snapshot of the EBS volume... you can find scripts online to accomplish that, which vary a bit depending on your choice of database and file system).