Hello all,
We hope you’ve enjoyed the first week of posts on Genomes Unzipped. We thought we would fill you in with a bit more information about the website, and what it has to offer.
Following GNZ
If you want to keep up-to-date with new posts, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. For information on new posts and other GNZ-related news, you can follow our Twitter feed @GenomesUnzipped. If you are interested in following the discussions that go on in the comments you can do so using the comments feed.
Finally, many of the GNZ authors write content elsewhere on the web, on their own blogs or on other collaborative websites. If you are still hungry for GNZ content, you can follow these authors’ posts by keeping an eye on the “Authors Elsewhere” box on the sidebar, or subscribing to the Authors Elsewhere RSS feed.
Personal Genomics Resources
We’ve put together a small list of personal genomics resources; websites that we find useful while investigating personal genetics.
We need your help in expanding this page; please leave a comment if there are any websites that you find useful for information, software or discussion about personal genomics, and would like to share with others. We’re also interested in the flip side; what resources would you like to use, but haven’t been able to find, or don’t think exist?
The Website Itself
This website is running a reserved instance on Amazon EC2; this is currently somewhat overkill for what is so far a simple blog, but it gives us the ability to expand out into other directions in the future.
The website costs are being covered by a generous grant from the PHG Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that provides information and consultation on the public health, legal, ethical and political issues surrounding genomic technology.
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Authors Elsewhere
Love the site. Please don’t burn out, you’re producing great material at a furious pace, and I hear that’s the primary hazard of blogging.
Just curious, what are you paying for your reserved EC2 instance? I’ve long sought an expandable way to host things that I want 100% uptime on and which I suspect might get big fast, and I’ve never really found the perfect solution.
@Christopher
Glad to hear you’re enjoying it so far; don’t worry about us burning out, we have plenty planned for the future, and a store of posts and post-ideas for if and when we start to feel the heat.
As for costs – a 12 month reserved instance comes out at about $40/month. You then need to add on traffic costs, storage costs, backup costs and so forth; exactly how much you pay depends on how much traffic and usage you get. A relatively high traffic blog will perhaps see another $5/month, whereas if you are storing and moving a few Gb a day you’re looking at closer to $20/month.
As I said in the post, this is somewhat pricey for what we’re doing at the moment (though the flex ability of the AWS system has helped out a lot when putting the site together). The real advantages come when you need to draft more resources in; bandwidth should scale indefinitely, and if more processing power is required it is easy to allocate more resources, or even use a dynamic IP to shift load between multiple EC2 servers.
I put together a document looking at various hosting solutions when we were planning the project, if you would like me to e-mail it to you. The figures are somewhat out of date now, but I think the spirit still holds.
Luke, thanks for your response. And yeah, I’d love to see that document! If you could send it to Christopher period Mims at gee mail dot com, that would be awesome.
The only thing I’ve ever seen that’s close to what you describe is Media Temple’s Grid Service. No idea how it compares performance-wise and in terms of features, though.
fwiw, a company i worked for 3 years ago had MAJOR issues with media temple. their facility was overheating and the customer support rep. was an excuse-maker.
I’m enjoying the posts so far…
Some more links to share:
http://genome.wellcome.ac.uk/
http://www.insidedna.org.uk
http://www.geneticalliance.org.uk/
http://www.hgc.gov.uk
Hi Elaine,
Sorry for the delay – it’s been a busy week! Great suggestions, which I’ve added to the resource page now.