Amazon EC2: Bitnami, Jet or just follow the tutorial?

  • tl;dr: best free stack for EC2?

    I’m running WP on the standard Amazon Linux stack on an EC2 t2.small instance. The MySQL db locks up fairly often. (Shopify! Your tables seem fragile!) That’s a problem I never had with good old shared hosting, or with a small managed VPS. We moved to unmanaged Amazon AWS to get a better edge firewall at a similar cost. (I guess we’re paying the price now!) In other words, our VPS provider said some DDoS attack was too much and invited us to leave. Rather than pay for expensive hosting that claims DDoS protection, we went with AWS to see if that would work.

    So my question. Should we:

    * Simple: stick with Amazon Linux but install MariaDB to replace MySQL and see if that’s a fix. Also research more security and admin stuff to install on the standard Amazon stack.

    * Replace our standard Amazon stack with the Bitnamai AMI in the marketplace. It’s free and has been around for a while. Will it have better security? Or is it more like a legacy product from before Amazon wrote its own LAMP tutorial and stack? ??

    * Go to a more recent free provider in the AMI marketplace, like a place called Jetware. Same question: is it better, specifically more secure and less likely to lock up?

    The real lack in the standard Amazon Linux stack is an admin tool. Currently to fix a stuck server I have to log into AWS, open the firewall to my current IP, then use SSH to restart services, and sometimes rebuild that Shopify table.

    Neither Jetware nor Bitnami offer any detail about what’s in the stack, so I don’t know if they’re any better than the Amazon tutorial way of setting up LAMP.

    Conclusion: The goal here is get this thing to manage itself without adding much expense. I did write one crontab script to restart the db daemon when an outside monitor reports the site is down, but that’s the kind of complication I was hoping to avoid by using an AMI from the marketplace.

    • This topic was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by kitchin.
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  • A few years back, when I first started using VPS hosting, I ran into all sorts of nasty problems like the ones you describe. Since then, I’ve realized that my problems all stemmed from one thing: lack of RAM.

    I now monitor RAM carefully and have a VPS with 2GB RAM and 4GB paging file. My monitoring indicates that I often use over 1GB (not counting Linux caching) even though all my web sites are low usage.

    Thread Starter kitchin

    (@kitchin)

    Thanks that may be it.

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