Zimbra + Amazon EC2 Questions

[physikal]

I am new to this whole EC2 stuff so I have some questions.

My understanding is EC2 instances are not permanent, once you term the instance everything resets. That is why "Volumes" come in to store perm data.

If I were to setup Zimbra on EC2 as a perm solution, would I take this route?

Setup instance using an existing AMI
Setup a Volume and Attach it to the AMI on /opt
Install Zimbra
Create my own AMI and save it to my personal AMI's.
Then continue to use my custom AMI w/ the static /opt volume mounted.

Am I correct in thinking this would be the right way to setup a perm Zimbra solution on EC2?

Thank you for your time.

[dgoradia]

I believe you are right. You can start an EBS instance, that way it will all be stored oon the EBS volume.

[LMStone]

You'll also need permanent IPs.

Watch the pricing though, hosting any mail server on a pay-as-you-go cloud host can quickly get more expensive than a more traditional colocation over the five-year life of a typical server.

And even cloud providers have outages...

Hope that helps,
Mark