Amazon S3 and VPS Question For Online Business

Another way to utilize S3/Cloud is the W3 Total Cache (I believe I have the name right)

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

It caches wordpress data to S3 and does other clever things that they say can add up a 10x speed improvement.

Depending on the amount of traffic (and especially the amount of traffic you expect to get) it might still be smart to get a VPS. Even if the images are hosted elsewhere, you can still outgrow shared hosting.

You could start with a small VPS then scale it up as your traffic grows.

I stream my videos via CloudFront and I haven't had the need for VPS albeit I haven't had a ton of traffic. Everything runs smoothly.

I don't have more than 20 unique visitors a day because my videos are only accessible to people who've bought my course. I also give them the option to download the videos to their hard drives if they prefer.

Not sure about the regions...

One of the reasons for using Amazon S3 services is because you don't want to manager servers yourself. Amazon servers can scale with large amount of traffic, so why would you want to pay for expensive VPS. I'll say you should stick to S3 and cloudfront.

Are you getting huge amount of traffic on hostgator shared server?

Have you taken a look at Kajabi? Kajabi is hosted on Amazon service so it can scale. I think, am not sure, Kajabi is hosted on EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which can scale with traffic surge. Also check out EC2 because in my opinion these cheap amazon services are better than Virtual Private Servers.

EC2 is a computer in the cloud, you can have your own instances of servers in the cloud, it's highly technical stuff you may need to outsource doing it, I havent used it myself. Please read the Amazon EC2 FAQ

Amazon EC2 FAQs

You can use S3 to host static web pages, so if you are worried about traffic surge then you can use simple HTML CSS to build your salesletter and then host it on S3 this way it will scale with traffic. P

I checked Hostgator VPS pricing, this should be the minimum server

Level 4 / Level 3
CPU - 1.9GHz / 1.13GHz
RAM - 1344MB / 768MB
Disk Space - 59GB / 30GB
Bandwidth - 1050GB / 500GB

1st Month $55.96 / $31.96
Recurring - $69.95 / $39.95

Go for Level 3 for your server specs, It's not too expensive if you are sure the huge traffic will come, you should be prepared.

Read the tips from WordPress here

High Traffic Tips For WordPress « WordPress Codex

"Quote from above link"
As painful as it may be to hear it, you might simply require a more powerful server.
Here is a simple outline of upgrade steps for a site that is having high-traffic problems. If you are having trouble with:

• Shared hosting, try upgrading to Virtual Dedicated Hosting.
• Virtual Dedicated Hosting, try upgrading to Dedicated Hosting.
• Dedicated Hosting, try upgrading to a higher-powered dedicated server.
• High-Powered Dedicated Hosting, it is time to talk with your host about multiple Load Balanced Servers.

Yes.

The reason why videos and images are hosted on S3 is because of the cost effectiveness. Streaming videos from amazon is very cheap. Another reason is you cannot exceed amazon hard drive capacity unlike VPS where you may need to upgrade your server specs just to host more videos.

S3 takes care of the media on your website, but the dynamic WordPress web pages where the media will be accessed still need to be served to visitors. This is where EC2 and VPS comes in.

Amazon S3 is a Cloud Host with many servers around the world. It does not matter where you are located or where your Port-of-entry is located. Once your account is established your data is mirrored to all servers so they can "serve up" your video in the shortest distance. So if your calling IP was Tokyo then you would be served from the Tokyo server. If your calling IP was Los Angeles then you would be served from the Los Angeles server. NO you do not need a VPS Amazon S3 is far superior to one. I would use Youtube unless you need to secure these videos such as member-sites. With You-Tube you get link-Juice, with S3, you don't....

There are 2 separate points here - S3 storage with Amazon and EC2 with Amazon. EC2 (their cloud servers) are regionally located. You can have multiple servers in multiple regions within one account. You can also start with a small server and upscale to a larger one very easily.

S3 storage is also regionally zoned and it allows you to host static websites. So you could easily put your UK targetted in content in a European bucket, and others elsewhere.

Everything depends on your traffic. If you think that your traffic will increase gradually then you can start with average hosting and upgrade it as your traffic increases

Do not use Amazon S3, it's really expensive.

I recommend Linode as VPS provider.

And Softlayer as Dedicated Server provider.

One of the biggest drawbacks to using Amazon services, is not what you can do with the service, but how confusing it is to get started, (much of the Amazon interface is still in the command line form three years after its inception) this creates a disparity between the casual user and the professional user, You can use a number of services, in cluding route 53 to manage your regional issues, however again it is not made easy or even user friendly.

(by the way host gator is not competitively priced and (allegedly over sells its VPS services) (allegedly) I would avoid using hostgator for alleged VPS services, see host talk forum, (google it) you can find competitive products, with real reviews, both good and bad,

AWS, is a great potential service, however, it is not user friendly, and since most of their clients are corporate clients, they do not have to deal with support for mid to small size business, which is likely why they do not yet have a user interface for their product, they don't need it, because the small users are the customers they are interested in having at all.

This should tell you one very important fact, AWS is not for small business at all, which means you would be better off with a premium VPS offering in a redundant facility.