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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.

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.

Amen. I did something similar last year and found performance to be no better than a good shared host. However, I’ve been using Amazon S3 as a CDN for static images for awhile. That works very well—except the monetary savings are not there. Amazon S3 at the highest rate, again, is not better than a good shared host.

I’ve tried some testing to upload CSS and JavaScript files but did something wrong. Changed the Content-Type to text/css but files still won’t load in the browser.

Any ideas?

...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.

Same here. I like the CDN capability but pricing is not a bargain unless you’re using massive storage and bandwidth.

I also read about an .xml file which can be used to prevent image and static resource hijacking. Haven’t figured that out yet, either. Amazon S3 is anything but user friendly.

And a follow up on restricting referrers in Amazon S3:

This Amazon Link lists policy code for Restricting Access to Specific HTTP Referrer. Implementation prevents image, file (CSS and JavaScript), and movie (not Flash) hijacking from sites using Amazon S3 for storage.

In your Amazon Management Console, select a bucket. Open Properties. Click Edit Bucket Policy. Insert code from above page and change the bucket name to match your bucket, and change the domain to match your site’s domain. Images in the bucket must be changed to Owner, not Public.

Amazon’s Referrer Bucket Policy prevents images and files from being hijacked. Only the domains in the policy can retrieve and display files from the bucket.

We hosted several sites in EC2 a few years ago - It worked okay. As others mentioned, the benefits weren’t really there. We got into trouble a few times when some of our sites had a huge boost in traffic, and we didn’t have a large enough instance to handle it. It’s easy enough to launch a larger instance, but it still means a few minutes of downtime.

With the larger instances, the prices got very high for is ($600/month), and will still had to maintain our own infrastructure.

Eventually we switched over to a Rackspace dedicated server - it’s a little more than we were paying by the time we left Amazon, but we’ve never had a problem handling the traffic and the stress of managing backups and infrastructure went away.

I just hit the forum up to see if there were any revelations for EE and EC2 since our original experience, but apparently it’s all about the same.

It’s quite possible to build an incredible infrastructure on EC2 with redundancy and scalability if you want to invest the time.  It would make a lot of sense if you are going to maintain a single, high traffic site or application, but that isn’t the case for most web shops

Hope this helps someone - I’d love to hear other people’s experiences.

Hey gwineman,

Thanks for the post.  I needed someone to reaffirm my suspicions.  We currently host the vast majority of our sites on a Rackspace PS and were looking for a cost effective alternative for some of our customers.  So far configuring the Amazon Linux image I chose hasn’t been as smooth as I had hoped.

I’ve also noticed that the terminal/ftp clients I’m using seem to experience a decent amount of lag.  I’m not sure if this indicative of mediocre server performance, but I’m going to do some page load comparisons for a more definitive impression.

Free for a year seems a little too good to be true.

-Zack