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Hosting Wordpress on Amazon EC2

by snapper
7 replies
Hi - Is there any advantage of hosting a wordpress site on Amazon EC2?

Does it work out cheaper than having a hostgator account?

It looks like you get a lot more control over the server and EC2 will handle large numbers of visitors at once.

Any other advantages?

Is it easy to set up - I notice there are a few good tutorials showing you how to do it.

Just wondering if I should use Amazon instead of normal hosting account but I am not sure if I am comparing apples with apples or whether there is a difference between hosting Wordpress on Amazon and 'normal' hosting.

At this stage I am thinking a little knowledge is probably dangerous and so I want to educate myself on the differences. Any help would be appreciated.
#amazon #ec2 #hosting #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author KirkMcD
    Start with a simple account somewhere and move up when you have to.
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  • Profile picture of the author affiliatepro15
    I think even at the cheapest, Amazon EC2 will end up costing around $75/month. Probably better to start with a cheaper solution like KirkMcD said. I personally use DownTownHost.com for the last couple years and my sites load quickly and I only pay around $7 month.
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    • Profile picture of the author snapper
      At $75 per month it will not be viable for most then.

      Guess I will just stick with what I have now.
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  • Profile picture of the author Helps Here
    When should you move up? How many visitors a month before you should up to EC2?
    Signature
    You can do it!!
    my new site is here!
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  • Profile picture of the author billyjf
    I just moved up from Arvixe shared hosting and I can tell you that, you'll know. If you have to ask then you don't need it I run several WordPress sites on Amazon High CPU Medium Instance - Heavy Utilization for only $53.37 per month. I get dedicated-like performance at easily a third of the cost of most providers. You'd need to know how to use Linux command line and manual setup though to make the most out of it like I have. I really like the 1.7 gigs of dedicated RAM and 2.5 core processors around 1.7 Ghz of average rated performance, something you'd be very hard pressed to get, even on a VPS setup, in my experience. I left Arvixe after being fed up with the time to first byte always being ridiculous for the first visitor to visit one of my sites after a lull in traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author billyjf
    I would also like to add, for low traffic sites, you may opt to use an EC2 micro, which is the SAME exact performance as the EC2 high cpu medium instance I have, with the only downside you can only realistically have around 40 visitors to your site, on average, I know because once I went over this the performance of my sites went down for up to 60 seconds. This is due to the fact that EC2 micro instances lose over 90% of the CPU cycles after more than 6 seconds or so of sustained CPU load, most low traffic sites won't do that, so you'll get extremely snappy performance, like I did, up to a point.

    EC2 micro is a great start into Amazon's offering, considering you get 12 months of their EC2 micro service, free of chrage, pay for nothing I still have my free EC2 micro hanging around for small random web projects I have and then use the High CPU Medium Instance for all my other, more serious work, I absolutely love it.
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  • Profile picture of the author billyjf
    I think you'll know when the time to move up to better hosting is, since you'll have the complaints to back it up right off the top (i.e. slow page loading times, time to first byte takes forever, my site isn't up the majority of the year, poor support, etc).
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