

I host ~25 low traffic websites & have some questions about moving to AWS - justindocanto

I've been using shared hosting, dedicated servers &#38; dedicated virtual servers with pretty straight forward pricing for years now, but after just hating the service, UI &#38; reliability most of the services i've come across (godaddy, 1&#38;1, network solutions, dreamhost, etc) and then recently running into an issue with MediaTemple not allowing adult sites (i host 2 adult sites)... AWS seems to be my final frontier of hosting.<p>So, since I want to put all my sites on 1 server (they're mostly side projects &#38; a few clients sites) to make my life easier... What does HN suggest when using AWS?<p>~20 of the sites average 10-50 hits a day<p>~5 of the sites  average 100-300 hits a day<p>About once a month, when mentioned by a blog or new marketing comes out, 2 or 3 of the sites will hit 1000 hits a day for a day or two and then go back down to their regular traffic sizes.<p>~5 are Magento stores<p>~15 are WordPress sites<p>~5 are static html sites with just a few pages<p>All but 1 of the Magento stores are actually just Magento sites being worked on, and wont live on the server for more than few months time. However there will always be at least this many on the box as i work on more stores.<p>My questions:<p>1. What service is right for me? EC2?<p>2. Is AWS just total overkill?<p>3. If AWS is a good idea, what size instance/server/service should i use?<p>4. What kind of prices am I looking at?<p>I would love to pay no more than 100/month if at all possible, but obviously if I need to I'm open to paying more. I am a firm believer in you get what you pay for. If better hosting costs more, than so be it.
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gexla
Hosting web sites on AWS requires EC2, which is basically a VPS. EC2 is
probably one of the worst available options if you are looking for UI and
reliability. The lack of reliability is a feature of EC2 as your instances can
just disappear with no warning. I don't know what your requirements are for
UI, but EC2 started out as a command line only interface and it's not much
better today. EC2 now has a console that you can use to start and stop
services, but there is nothing to help you create a working hosting
environment.Creating a robust environment for your needs is likely more
trouble than it's worth with EC2.

Look into similar services such as Rackspace cloud servers which has similar
offerings in a more traditional package. Rackspace also offers managed VPS
packages. For your purposes you probably won't need anything more than 512MB
or 1GB of RAM.

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justindocanto
Hi Gexla, since making this post... I've discovered a lot of what you've
mentioned here. AWS is definitely overkill for what I'm looking for. The UI is
not friendly, the purpose behind it are not even what I'm looking for. I didnt
realize AWS was delivering such a raw platform, meaning... 'we provide a
machine, you do the rest'. That is not what i am looking for by any means. I
will check out rackspace & I am looking into other managed server hosting
providers as well. I really appreciate your input and thank you so much for
the reply =)

