Using EC2 as a hosting privider

  • Hello Everyone,
    I am a moderately seasoned Linux user (Ubuntu) and WordPress developer who has seen the interesting uses of amazon EC2 cloud servers. I am thinking about giving it a go, but I have a few questions before I do, I was hoping someone here could help me out.

    First of all, what tier of instances should I use, initally? They give you the micro tier free for a year, but I don’t know if that gives me the best system resources. I will have maybe a 100mb website, and a 15mb dbase to begin with, and about 100-200 visitors a day, so it’s not a heavy duty website.

    Next is what happens when website starts to need more resources that the tier provides, meaning mostly more traffic and a larger database. I will obviously need to create a new and better instance, but when I make the switch from one to another will it be seamless?

    My next question is what happens if my database becomes too system intensive for the single instance, can I create and use a dedicate MySQL database server?

    Lastly, and most importantly, what about using things such as load balancing, and failsafes. How can I back up, or image the server, and have use load balancing of the system.

    Thanks for your help
    Zach

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  • I have a number of sites running in EC2, and for what you describe you can get away with the free tier, I would suggest though that you consider running Nginx as your web-server as the free tier is rather limited in memory.

    The beautiful thing about EC2 is you can just scale the instance when you need more power, or you can build a second instance and start to use a load balancer (which lets you take one down too and tinker with it without taking your site down).

    Regarding the database, running it on the same instance as your web is fine, bear in mind the memory is limited on a micro instance, but it works, as you scale up, start to use their RDS service, which is awesome, but it is an instance.

    As for backup, there are a bazillion ways to backup, I take snapshots of the file system, and I use a plugin that backs up my wp-content folder and database to Amazon S3 daily.

    Hope this helps.

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