I have a wordpress based classified ad website. I have 2 main problems.
Some users are uploading big images which affect the site loading times.
I plan to do some advertising which could cause traffic spikes.
So Im thinking about moving to Cloud hoping to make the site load faster and easily scale up the site if I face a traffic spike. I came across Amazon EC2 + S3 AND mainly DigitalOcean and other cloud hosting providers.
So if Im concerned about Site Loading Times and Cost Effectiveness what would you recommend from following scenarios: (Im kind of new to this. So if Im suggesting something dumb, please correct me)
Use Amazon EC2 for hosting EVERYTHING (Wordpress core files + images-wp content)
Use Amazon EC2 for Wordpress Core files and Amazon S3 for images
Use DigitalOcean or similar to host Everything
Use DigitalOcean or similar to host Wordpress Core files and Amazon S3 for images
A lot of this is personal preference, load, scalability, etc. It depends on your situation.
Amazon EC2 is going to be easier for you to micro-scale. To move resources up in increments, or subtract them, add instances, load balance, etc. There are also auto-scaling things you can set up that will increase your resources during high load times, which sounds like something you could use.
Digital Ocean is a dream of easiness to get set up, and you can scale up generally easily. It’s also pretty reliable and pretty fast. But nowhere near the micromanaging capability of EC2, in my opinion. It’s easier and less time consuming to manage, in my experience, but you have way less options. Depends on what you need.
If you’re really concerned about the image hosting, maybe it would be good to use S3 for images either way.
What about the cost effectiveness? I saw in lot of places that Amazon can be expensive. Also as you can’t predict how much will be the bill, its risky.
Correct, it is a bit more unpredictable IF you’re using flexible options as I was mentioning. If you aren’t, you should be able to predict a pretty close approximation of your total bill per month.
You can also set resource limits, and/or alerts. So it might email you when your billing reaches a certain point, or your usage of a resource, etc. There’s a lot of options. And since you’re forced into packages with Digital Ocean, you may end up paying more to get what you need of X resource while inadvertently paying for way too much of Y resource.
On the other hand, if a Digital Ocean package matches what you need pretty closely, and the subsequent larger packages above it match what you might want to expand into… it’d be much more predictable and easy to manage. Digital Ocean is a pretty amazing deal for the price - you get a lot - if it matches your needs.
I’ve just been through a lot research in how to handle something similar to you.
Amazon EC2 servers offer so many options that it can be a bit overwhelming to determine what best suits your needs. However, after testing out Digital Ocean, I decided to stick with them based on their simplicity. It’s amazingly easy to set up and there’s no surprises on your bills. I’d still recommend you use S3 for hosting your images because it’s so damn cheap!
You can get a decent idea of what your S3 costs are going to be by using their estimator tool. For example, storing 50gb worth of images, and using 50gb data transfer will cost you less than $5/month. You can combine that with a $10/mth Digital Ocean server, and your ongoing costs will be quite manageable!
You can try out Digital Ocean and have a Wordpress site running in under 5 minutes. You only pay per hour that the server is running, so you can test it out, and if you don’t like it, you can cancel it just as easily.
If you don’t mind sharing with Netfilx then EC2 is easy to set up with load balancing and it will only charge you for the time it’s powered up. I’m running a free years trial on the basic package and not had any probs with it.
That said I’m using Digital Ocean and couldn’t recommend them more. They just gave me a $25 rebate so here’s a shameless plug!
Why go with an IaaS provider and not a PaaS provider? This way you can concintrate on the code and not worry about the administration of the server or the complicated hassle of AWS. DigitalOcean does a great job but you still have to manage the server. What about something like GearHost which would let you only have to worry about your app?