Amazon WS
It’s been a full circle for me and my hosting career. In 2005 I started hosting at home. I used a AMD Athalon 2 Core 64MB Ram. I used Apache web server, tomcat. Started using the beta version ofGallery Photo Hosting, Wordpress Blog was the platform for all hosting. Since then both the tools have come a long way.
In 2010 I moved away from hosting at home and started using Blue Host for all my websites. In total I was hosting around 6 websites. Bluehost provided me with the platform where I didn’t have to manage any infrastructure and also provided lot of easy ways to maintain and install both Wordpress and gallery. I was happy with it until I started getting bored and wanted to start doing things by myself and hence Amazon and AWS.
AWS is not something new and has been around for a while. Amazon is giving 1 year free and you can leverage a lot of the tools that are available. Some of the tools that I have used so far
1. EC2 instance — Setup a Amazon version of linux and setup all the softwares that are needed (PHP, Python, VSFTP, rails, MySQL). Setting up an instance is so easy that the entire process will take you not more than couple hours(including the software installation). Yum package manager lets you install things without much hassle.
2. Amazon RDS — Relational DB service. This service lets you pick any DB. MySQL is the one which is needed for all the tools that I run. Your EC2 instance can connect seamlessly into the RDS service.
3. Amazon CloudFront — CDN required to make your website fast and also very efficient in delivering static content. Also with Wordpress I have used W3-Total Cache which works pretty great.
Within a week I was up and running one of my website on AWS cloud. I realised that the cost can mount of to a hefty price if you are running just one website and also using more services means more money. So far I really enjoyed AWS as that has provided a cool way to build your infrastructure.