Hosting info request, possibru money.

[ECA]

So family business web presence is struggling, we're paying a ~2k a year but we're getting like 3-5% downtime because the servers cant cope occasionally: we have atm:

4 EC2 instances + 1 elastic bean stalk app

Also we're looking at PCI compliance to make ordering w/ CC smoother/easier.

If anyone has any experience would really appreciate some advice, possibly even a few days paid work, or more.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

Will we be paid in gold?

 

[ECA]

If you like!

 

[Poag]

What does the site mainly service? Static or dynamic content?

Whats it running on atm, software wise.

Get in touch with this lot http://www.sleek.net/ they are owned by a friend of mine and are quite respectable.

If you elect to stay as you are ish. I'd recommend you use a permanent webserver, then use a load balencer to spawn ec2 instances on an as needed basis, afaik Sleek offer this service aswell, that should bring down your costs and give you greater capacity.

Depending on what you serve you may need a dedicated database rig aswell.

Info on what your serving would help tho

 

[Wij]

PaaS > IaaS.

Use something like Heroku as a website host.

 

[Chilly]

PaaS > IaaS.

Use something like Heroku as a website host.

Almost certainly requires a re-write. Sounds like they're serving a fairly generic webshop, probably zencart or whatever.

 

[Gwadien]

I'll send this to a friend of mine who just set up a hosting business, it's early days, so he's doing cheap shit hot deals.

 

[ECA]

Almost certainly requires a re-write. Sounds like they're serving a fairly generic webshop, probably zencart or whatever.

Pretty much, with a small amount of dynamic content. ( Like < 20% ). But running ~10+ sites.

 

[Poag]

Whats your technical skill level?

Farm off as much of the static content to a nginx/lighttpd server as you can, do dynamic with apache or your cgi server of choice.

A nginx/apache hybrid may work for you fairly well.
You can also farm some of the load off onto services like cloudflares cdn for free/not much, thats probably your quickest and easiest way to knock back on server load while you work on the other two.


I'll assume your client base is mostly UK based? So you run 4 EC2 instances 24/7 even during the night? or low periods? Save some money and use amazon Elastic Load Balencer to spawn/top instances during high/low periods of usage. Its very noob friendly so easy to setup. The auto scaling is what your looking at really http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/


Edit: Just remeber to set the minumum run period to an hour, as amazon will bill you for an hour regardless of how much time the instance runs for under an hour.

 

[ECA]

Bumping just in case people missed it the first time

So you run 4 EC2 instances 24/7 even during the night?

Load balancer is used.

 

[Poag]

But it runs 4 instances all the time? or is 4 the max? or is it just a load balencer pushing the load to the 4 servers and not a instance balencer..which is what i am referring to in my autoscaling section.

Trying to save you money here. AWS is not hard to scale around, being able to do it yourself with some confidence will save you money in the long term!