DC Circulator Gadget

The Circulator API dies silently, so nothing is updated on the map anymore.

The Rackspace Cloud

I want to have a "playground" for Java-based project hosting . I want something cheap, easy accessible and it's ok to have some downtime, it's kind of self-education, hobby project after all.

1. Host at home, using DynDns or similar service


2. Google App Engine


3. The RackSpace Cloud servers


4. Amazon EC2

The first option looks good, the two only objections are need in new comp (old one is noisy and energy inefficient) and I'll be forced to use non-standard http port because Verizon block incoming traffic on port 80. Also unclear what will happens if I'll switch to another Internet provider.

I like GAE, my current playground at http://wayponts.appspot.com/, however fighting with limitations of GAE makes me crazy (sometimes), database design for Datastore is unusual, data updates consume a lot of CPU, so it's very easy to get all free CPU quota. So, what is Google provide for free is almost perfect for my purposes but... (unavoidable "but" :-) )

Third option will cost me about $10-15/month (cost of my lunch, I can definitely skip one :-) ) and give me a very basic Linux server with 256M RAM and 10G of disk space. Not too bad.

Amazon EC2 is good, but small image starts from $60-70/month and reserved $270 (1 year term) one time plus $20-25/month in case of 100% utilization. Cheap but not enough cheap for hobby project.

It's possible to find another options like [DE]Systems loaded with pre-installed services. However, in sake of simplicity, The Rackspace Cloud Servers is a winner.

PS
I still want a silent nettop as development server.

Transit data to be made available to third party developers

Look at http://developer.wmata.com/docs.

Heh...