I'm going to need to host a website with an underlying database. I know I can either run the database on the instance itself, or I can have it on an EBS volume. I'm going to be backing up to S3 every so often, and I was wondering what the benefits were of running the database on EBS and not the instance itself.
The EBS volume will be fast, super fast. It's basically attached to your instance as a drive. However a drawback to this is that you'll only be able to attach it to one instance at a time. I've heard of EBS volumes dropping...this article talks about some of that stuff...i would just let it live on the instance it self, and snapshot it from there if it's going to be a small db.