Recently I’ve been looking into migrating my VPS acccount onto one of Amazons cloud services (EC2?) and running my websites/clients websites from that.

1) Has anyone had any experience of using a AWS account as a kind of reseller account?

2) Has anyone had any experience of setting up ExpressionEngine within an AWS environment?

All the articles I’ve seen are based around AWS just for an individual web app etc.

I see you can do things like consolidated billing which looks like it’s going in the direction I want it to go in.

I appreciate there will be a slight learning curve to AWS especially since I’m used to just using cPanel in the past but am up for the challenge.

I am also interested in migrating to the same solution. Deeper, did you make any progress on this topic as it pertains to EE or the like? Thanks for any help!

This looks interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Host-Your-Web-Site-Cloud/dp/0980576830/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1290109160&sr=8-3

leeaston - 18 November 2010 08:40 PM

This looks interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Host-Your-Web-Site-Cloud/dp/0980576830/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1290109160&sr=8-3

That book is a good starting point they also sell as a digital version (on Sitepoint I think) if you don’t want to wait.

Regarding 2). I’ve setup an EE install running on EC2 (with an EBS volume and elastic IP) using Amazon RDS for the database. Worked fine though you’ll need to be slightly proficient with server administration to get up and running (or buy the book).

Gareth, did you happen to keep notes as you worked through the process? I’d love to set up EE on a micro instance (free [for 1 year] for new customers!). What do you think so far? Responsiveness, uptime? I know you can configure it however you like, since it’s just a Linux box.

I’m planning to follow these two tutorials, but would love your thoughts too, if you can share.

Absolute First Step Tutorial for Amazon Web Services
How to run Drupal on Amazon EC2 using a new micro instance

(Yes, the second link is for a Drupal site, but the setup is similar.)

Your question blows my mind of what is capable with AWS. I felt so proud just setting up a simple cloud to host all my UI files (CSS, Images, and Javascript).

A question to your question. I’ve read Amazon’s description, but it’s hard for me to picture what you get with EC2. Does this enable you to cancel your existing hosting and go solo with AWS with ExpressionEngine?

I’m a painter, not a canvas maker - aka server guy.

Bransin~ I’d say yes, you could cancel your existing hosting and go solo with AWS for EE. That comes with a large caveat: you have to manage the server yourself. If it falls down, you have to restart it; if it gets hacked, you have to clean it. If you’re a “painter”, then all that extra work might not be to your liking. (Or maybe it is: you got such a thrill with the S3 setup. :D)

That said, I believe what you get with the ‘micro’ instance (free for the first year!) is more than sufficient to power a small (possibly medium) EE site. It’s certainly better than what you’re going to get from a shared host.

From what I know about it, AWS would work just fine.  You’d have to attach your instance to EBS, which I believe is their equivalent of a hard drive so that your database and files persist in case you have to restart your instance.  That’s one quirky difference between AWS and a VPS—when you restart a VPS, your stuff is all there.  With EC2, it’s a fresh machine image each time, so EBS is required to hold the data you want to persist.

I’ll just through this out there in case it helps—a couple months ago I posted some concerns about speed with Rackspace Cloud Sites.  About a month ago, I got an e-mail that they were doing something with load balancing, and the next day all my sites are moving along rather speedily, so I no longer have any gripes about putting EE on Rackspace Cloud Sites.  It’s like $149/mo and includes a bunch of stuff.  I’ve got about 90 of my client’s sites running on it like a dream and am using maybe like 5% of the plan’s resources.

Sounds interesting. Would love to know how people get on with this.

What’s the cost factor involved with AWS? Does it compare with standard VPS hosting?

What’s the main advantage? The speed benefits of a CDN?

John Ryan - 07 December 2010 11:59 AM

Sounds interesting. Would love to know how people get on with this.

What’s the cost factor involved with AWS? Does it compare with standard VPS hosting?

What’s the main advantage? The speed benefits of a CDN?

EC2+RDS is appropriate if you want to be hands-on in installation, configuration, and operations - and you want the ability to create/destroy entire machine instances OR need the ability to scale up to larger instances (without the typical model of changing out hardware, etc.)

However, it won’t (by default) solve the CDN issues - Amazon has a separate CloudFront solution.

Amazon WS offer scalability, but you need to decide for yourself if you need that much power/flexibility and want to spend the time/effort to do so (vs. a typical hosting or VPS).

Cool - I’ll have to check that out.

It would be really great if someone posted a wiki entry or FAQ QA about all known aspects of integrating EE and AWS….even simple S3 use.

It seems as if even the basic questions are perplexing - for instance, if a site wants to start simple and have all or most images served from S3, what is the best way to do this? I see the add-ons, but it is not clear how one gets EE to query AWS for the files…...do some folks us a naming convention on AWS and then use .htaccess rewriting to get the files? I serve vast numbers of files which were uploaded to our forums. Is there a way to automatically make all these images be uploaded to AWS (when the user uploads)?

Someone must know “all”.........

Do folks think that serving CSS and JS and the basic page building blocks (images) for something like the Forums…....will that take a significant load off the existing server?

I started an AWS account and so far have moved only my popular ad banners there - I guess every little think helps! SInce I manually enter these image URL’s in the banner program, this is an easy job. But it would be great to have the hundreds of megs of uploaded forum and wiki images be served from there…...

Any hints welcome - and, as I mentioned, a wiki article or two starting with the really simple things would be nice!

Bransin - 02 December 2010 06:57 AM

Your question blows my mind of what is capable with AWS. I felt so proud just setting up a simple cloud to host all my UI files (CSS, Images, and Javascript).
.

Exactly how did you set that up, and what is the result? Are you seeing speed improvements serving css and js from Amazon?

handyman - 24 December 2010 05:53 PM

Exactly how did you set that up, and what is the result? Are you seeing speed improvements serving css and js from Amazon?

First I would check on Greg Aker’s “Make No Assumptions With Asset Management”.

I’ve noticed a slight improvement serving CSS, JS, and large UI images from the amazon’s CloudFront. It does have it’s disadvantages though for developers in regards to CSS and JS. The major reason is caching problem with regularly updated files.

Through Amazon’s interface you have no ability to clear cache which has lead me to renaming CSS files by date with version number. I’ve spent a few good hours trying to figure out why my CSS changes weren’t happening for iPhone.

Advantages are that you are conserving bandwidth with your website if one massive traffic storm were to hit. Unfortunately there isn’t anything available currently of bridging a gap between the EE file manager and AWS for users. I’m speaking of any file type uploads to AWS. Managing and deleting files would be a plus. This I find a great development idea for 3rd party developers.

I’d be interested to see benchmarks, does anyone have any?

A basic report of a simple experience….

My old dual-core 3 GHZ server was getting overloaded with EE (mostly forums), so as a band-aid I moved some resources to S3 (simple storage, not the full cloud)......

I moved, for instance, banner ads which show 100,000 times a day.
I then moved some larger static site images.
I also moved the larger CSS files from EE - forum pages css and wiki CSS.
I moved larger JS scripts.

It, along with some other tweaks, definitely helped things. This is the “straw that broke the camel’s back” routine…..normally, serving those files locally should be a piece of cake, but once I was overloaded they just added to the speed delays. Based on rough calculations, I think I was able to get about a 10% total increase in terms of page views without the server bogging down beyond usefulness - say, from 80,000 to 90,000 page views per day (heavily forum weighted).

BUT, this week I moved to a new server - with the biggest difference being a XEON as opposed to a dual-core.

What a difference! Massive difference.  The server load is extremely low and now google webmaster tools reports that serving the CSS from afar might be slowing me down (DNS calls and css is not compressed on S3). So I moved it back locally…..

I think “it depends” is the answer to most of these questions. When your ship is sinking, any bailing at all can help a little bit, but the best idea is to stay high and dry!

I predict we will see more cloud integration tools built into EE and other apps in the future. Personally, I’m looking forward to my entire next server (2-3 years) perhaps being in the cloud or else being replicated in the cloud…...

FYI, speed graph from goog enclosed.
Server was moved on Jan 10, so most of the downslope was due to optimization and some resources moved to S3.

Traffic was basically similar for the entire period nov. 15 to date.

You can now host static sites using S3, not much use for EE but a good development

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/02/17/Amazon-S3-Website-Features/

I have ran EE1.6 on EC2 for a few days and honestly not much difference in performance as compared to average shared hosting.Granted they were just a few test queries but still…clean *smallest LAMP instance in Amazon compared to potentially well used shared host. I was using Amazon DB ONLY while files were hosted on my shared hosting.

“conserving bandwidth” is a myth considering how much Amazon charges…just because something is in decimal point does not mean it is less than it is . Read some more interesting info on RDS.This module might be of interest to this thread: http://www.devdemon.com/channel_files/

So perhaps my *tests were not ‘real’ but first impressions were marginal and have not tried it since. Besides, most larger hosts are ‘in the cloud’ as is so Amazon is ‘just another large host’ in my eyes.