title: Newbie to Amazon AWS, setup question
body: <p>Background: I'm an ASP.NET developer with not much of experience when it comes to server administration. </p>
  
  <p>I researched high and low on Amazon AWS and I think we are going to go with the "Reserved Small Instance".  My questions are the following</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Due to pricing of MS SQL server is too expensive, we are going to use MySQL. Now, do you install Mysql yourself, on the same instance or a different one, on EBS or not EBS? Is there a windows AMI with mysql for free? I can't seem to find any.  </p></li>
  <li><p>It seems, if you install MySQL yourself, you will have to handle all the backup, load balancing yourlsef correct? Any tutorials out there that teach you that? and what's your experience with Amazon RDS for a fee? How is the price of RDS working out for you? </p></li>
  <li><p>Given I have very little experiences when it comes to server administration, dumb question. Is there a need for me to order load balancing even if I just buy "Small Instance"? You would need at least two machines to load balance as I understand it right? Or "Small Instance", buy one plan, you can create as many "machine" as you need? A bit confused. </p></li>
  <li><p>Could someone give me an estimate of how much 1GB bandwidth is in terms of traffic, mostly text, non graphic intensive (like Google plus ish)? Each page have a max of 100kb (with compressed javascript and all that)</p></li>
  <li><p>Lastly, I have search functions using Lucene.NET, which stores search indexes as text on hard drive. From what I've read so far, if the instance is gone, your files are gone, so should I store that on EBS? or S3? </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Thanks a lot for having the patience to read through the load of dumb questions. I really appreciate you taking the time to answer them. </p>