More on Hosting with Amazon EC2

After moving the hosting of oceanseventy to Amazon EC2 before departing for pastures new I was fairly keen to try it out again on a site that was more than a few hundred hits a day.  I recently had call to host a single static page that would get hit about 13,000 times within the space of a couple of hours – but do very little for the rest of the time.

So I set up a small instance running on EC2, running Ubuntu 8.04 and tweaked Apache2 a little to increase the MaxClients setting.

Unfortunately not everything went to plan.  While the server itself was rock solid the response times from Apache grew very quickly to 20+ seconds.  So I’m trying to figure out what the next plan of attack is.  Do I set up a load balancer on EC2 and share the load with a number of instances, or do I go with a larger instance for the duration of the traffic spike, upgrading to a large or extra large instance.  Are there some settings I should be tweaking on Apache?  Should I be trying out an alternate webserver like Lighttpd?

Or maybe I give up and get back to the day job  Any advice appreciated.