Estos Ășltimos dĂas me ha dado por aprender un poco el funcionamiento de Amazon AWS y montar este blog utilizando Ășnicamente los servicios de Amazon (Y GoDaddy para registrar el dominio). Empezando por el final, lo he conseguido a medias.
Basically, Amazon Web Services is divided into several services that offer very specific services. On a shared/private server, all these services are already configured as standard without touching practically anything, which could pose considerable difficulty for someone who is not used to dealing with server administration and web services.
Please note! The estimated costs in this article are for an EC2 micro instance. After a month of testing and fine-tuning the server, I can say that for hosting a blog with 2,000 daily visits, this type of instance is too unstable.
What are we going to do?
So we have decided to set up a Wordpress blog using Amazon. What advantages does it offer us? To begin with, it is âcheapâ compared to other similar services. It is very customizable, fast and has a very high uptime (Server availability time). On the other hand, as I said before, you have to have certain knowledge and A LOT OF PATIENCE to get everything going.
Setting up a blog doesnât just mean installing Wordpress and running. It is likely that we will also need to store its data (images, videos,âŠ), configure a domain for it, install a contact form plugin to send/receive emails (In this case we will use Google Apps), etc. All this using the following Amazon services:
- Amazon EC2: Where we will have our virtual server and where we will install Wordpress.
- Amazon S3: Where we will store our images and static files.
- Amazon CloudFront: We will use it as a CDN to increase the speed of requests to static blog files.
- Amazon Route 53: Management of the blogâs DS records. They will be used to configure mail servers.
On what basis are we going to be charged?
We are going to use a few services and unfortunately they are not free, although Amazon AWS allows us to only pay for what we use. The billing for each service is different and is as follows.
- Amazon EC2: Charges us for each hour that the server is running and for bandwidth. If we want to have it running 24/7, we will have to pay the maximum, which is an average of 24 x 31 hours.
- Amazon S3: It depends on the amount of disk space we use and the number of PUT/POST requests made to the stored content.
- Amazon CloudFront: The price depends on the outgoing bandwidth consumed and per 10,000 requests (HTTP/HTTPS).
- Amazon Route 53: Consumption depends on how many domains we have and for every million requests made to it.
How much is it going to cost us?
Although Amazon AWS has a price calculator, at first it can be difficult to estimate what we will consume in each section, so you can get an idea of ââwhat it would cost taking into account that the following real data belongs to a blog with about 2,000 visits a day.
- Amazon EC2: $24.50.
- Amazon S3: 0.07 dollars (approximately 1.40 dollars for the first month, because we will have to transfer all the files once).
- Amazon CloudFront: $1.80.
- Amazon Route 53: $0.80.
To all this, we will have to add taxes (VAT), which are more or less 20%. With the previous prices it would be around $5.40.
Conclusions
Taking into account that the calculations are approximate since the expense depends on consumption, using Amazon AWS to host a blog would cost about 28 dollars per month, about 21 euros at the exchange rate. It is not expensive considering what is offered to us, although it is not affordable for everyone and you have to be very clear about how to make it profitable.
If we have a blog with these visits, a shared server is more than enough (as long as we donât have any filigree set up that consumes an exaggerated amount of memory), but if you are one of those who likes to tinker and have everything under control, it is a good option since it is a little cheaper than a VPS and offers you more customization possibilities.