Benefits of hosting a Web site on EC2 & S3

• The hosting management is self-service. Anytime you want, you can provision additional servers yourself and immediately. Unlike with most traditional hosting companies, there is not need to contact their staff and have to wait for them to set up your server. On EC2, once you have signed up for an account and set up one server, you can provision (or decommission) additional servers within minutes. Even the initial setup is self-service.
• EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes. You can commission one or hundreds of server instances simultaneously. Because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs. Billing is metered by an hour as the unit. This flexibility of EC2 can benefits many use cases:
  • If your web sites get seasonal traffic (e.g. a fashion site during shows) or can temporarily get much higher traffic for a period of time (e.g. a news site), EC2′s business model of pay for what you use by the hour, is cost-effective and convenient.
  • If yours is the R&D or Skunkworks group at a large or medium size organization or a startup company with limited financial resources, renting servers from EC2 can have many benefits. You don’t have to make a capital investment to get a server farm up and running, nor make long-term financial commitments to rent infrastructure. You can even turn off servers when not in use, greatly saving costs.
    • You don’t pay a cent for servers not running, except for disk storage costs for your files on S3, which is so inexpensive that Jeremy Zawodny calculates is even cheaper than buying reliable storage for personal use at home.
    • My favorite photo hosting web site, Smugmug‘s CEO estimates how much money Smugmug saves about by using S3. The numbers are amazing.
• It allows me to use the modern Ubuntu¹ GNU/Linux operating system, Server Edition. Among Ubuntu’s many benefits are its user friendliness and ease of use. Software installations and upgrades are a breeze. That means less time is required to maintain the system while retaining the flexibility and power being a systems administrator gives.
• EC2 has lower total cost ownership for me than most hosting providers’ virtual hosting or dedicated server plans. Shared (non virtual server) hosting is still cheaper, but no longer meets my sites’ requirements.²

Potential drawbacks/caution with EC2 & S3

• While S3 is persistent storage, EC2 virtual server instances’ storage does not persist across server shutdowns. So if your web site is running a database and storing files on an EC2 instance, you should implement scheduled, automated scripts that regularly back up your database and your files to S3 or other storage.
  • Consistent with what I read in some comments online, my EC2 virtual server instance did not lose its file-system state or settings when I rebooted it. So rebooting seems to be safe.³
  • This potential drawback is arguably a good thing in some ways. It compels you to implement a good backup and recovery system.
  • This also means that after installing all the software on your running Amazon Machine Image (AMI), you should save it by creating a new AMI image of it as explained in the Creating an Image section of the EC2 Getting Started Guide.
    • This is an issue since you may want to do this every time after you update your software, especially with security patches. Until Amazon implements persistent storage for EC2 instances, you could do this monthly. You can script this to be partly or fully automated. Since Amazon’s EC2 instances are quite reliable, this is not a major concern.
• An EC2 instance’s IP address and public DNS name persists only while that instance is running. This can be worked around as described under the tech specs section below.

Some articles about Amazon’s hosting infrastructure services:

• Forbes.com: Amazon’s Hot New Item: Its Data Center
• Wired.com: New From Amazon: Guaranteed Server Uptime

Tech specs of my site:

• Hosting Environment & Configuration
  • Amazon EC2 default “small” size instance
  • Dynamic DNS Management:ZoneEdit.com
    • I use a Ruby script to dynamically update DNS from my EC2 host on ZoneEdit. My script is based on the one written by Scott Patten. It uses the ez-ipupdate program in a custom way for EC2.
• LAMP Stack:
  • Operating System: Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition, GNU/Linux⁴
  • Web Server: Apache 2
  • Database: MySQL 5
  • Programming Languages: PHP, Java, Python, Ruby
  • PHP Accelerator: Alternative PHP Cache (APC)
    • Instructions for installing APC on Ubuntu
  • Content Management System: WordPress

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1. www.ubuntu.com
2. I plan to split rajiv.com into separate sites, The India Comedy site will move to comedy.rajiv.com and the SPV Alumni site will move to spv.rajiv.com. The latter two are community sites and will benefit from a community CMS like Drupal.
3. However, please be aware of a known issue that on some occasions caused instance termination on reboots.
4. I created my AMI virtual machine by building on top of a public Ubuntu AMI by Eric Hammond.

Related posts:

1. Using Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) with an EC2 Instance
2. Hosting Large-Scale Web Sites: Contract Review Guide for the CTO
3. Web site hosting provider and technologies change

I say this as someone who has been immersed in web content management for major news media companies since 1995. I have spent over a decade leading teams evaluating, implementing, maintaining and developing content management and publishing systems, including some industry award winning ones. My teams (including me personally) have been working closely with writers, editors, designers, photo/multimedia staff, sales and marketing folks at companies whose livelihoods depend on publishing content. I’ve also maintained my personal web sites since 1994.

It is impressive how well WordPress has worked as a CMS for the blogs and pages on this site. It is simple to use and painless to configure, manage and upgrade. It minimizes overhead and maintenance work.

WordPress plays well with others. It doesn’t require you to convert all your static content and pages powered by other CMS systems and custom scripts into WordPress. This allows you to conveniently migrate content to WordPress over time, preserving the URLs and keeping your site functional.

No wonder so many non-technical people and technologists alike use it for their sites: I switched to WordPress inspired by reading the personal blog of a colleague and CTO at another major media company who had also switched to WordPress. It is one of the best solutions for personal web sites and small to medium size organizations.

WordPress also powers the blogs of several major media companies with millions of daily page views. It has an well-designed architecture that makes it an excellent choice for large-scale use. It is used by a large and growing number of sites, including CNN, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, General Motors, Southwest Airlines, People Magazine, Apple Computer, Sony PlayStation US, C|Net, NY Times, Ziff Davis, Xerox, Delta Airlines and many others.

WordPress is a great choice because

• Simple to use for writers and editors
• Quick and simple to install, maintain and upgrade for systems administrators
  • E.g. automated daily backups to remote systems using a plugin
• Good architecture for programmers to extend functionality if needed
• Search engine-friendly and people-friendly URL structure
• Dynamic publishing model of content managed in and served from a relational database. Content management and delivery are seamlessly integrated.
  • Presentation, as in design, is well separated.
  • This is a superior approach compared to other blog / CMS systems that recommend publishing static files.
    • In the file publishing model, those files are then served directly by the web server or processed by a web application server / CMS. That architecture, used by other blog platforms does not scale well and has been found to be error-prone, especially under heavy publishing/editing/commenting use.
  • If needed, external caching¹ can be used that provide all the benefits of static file publishing without the drawbacks.
• Excellent content management in a relational database
• Rich feature set for advanced web publishing needs
• Large and growing user base, well-supported and actively developed by the community
• A large and growing number of plugins that add functionality to WordPress
  • WordPress is used by so many people that it is often likely that someone has developed a good solution for what you require. The WordPress directory is teeming with plugins, themes and other extensions developed and given by the community.
  • For example, support for OpenID as a client and server, site usage tracking with web analytics.
• Plethora of third-party commercial support options available if needed
• Free of license costs. Simple to operate and operate. Low total cost of ownership. An economical solution.
• Reliable. Good performance. Scalable. Secure.
• Open source

What WordPress currently lacks

• A simple, standard way to place a widget in the main content area of a blog post or WordPress page. Currently plugins that need to place a widget there require putting in some special markup whose syntax varies with each plugin. Many use an HTML <!–comment–> syntax in the Code editing mode. Some use a syntax of [commands in braces] in the Visual editing mode.
  • A good solution would be for wordpress to allow widget placement and manipulation completely within the Visual content editing mode. Behind the scenes, in the code view, all plugins would use consistent markup syntax and it would be editable using a menu option in the Visual editing mode.
• A way for certain widgets to only appear in the sidebar(s) of particular WordPress Pages or particular blog posts.
  • A good solution would be to have the ability to place a widget only on certain URLs that match a regular expression. Also, the edit form should have an option to include a widget only on a particular post or Page.

Alternatives

Another excellent choice for a blogging CMS is MovableType. I’ve had extensive experience with it and like it a lot too. MovableType and WordPress are the two leading products in their category.

If you are looking for a full-fledged content management system, consider Drupal or Plone. After a successful run for many years, my own Java-based Cofax is heading towards retirement.

If you need to build your own custom CMS, build using frameworks like Python with Django, Ruby on Rails or Groovy with Grails.

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1. E.g. content delivery network like Akamai, an accelerator/cache like Squid or Varnish

Related posts:

1. Future of Content Management for News Media for Web sites
2. Social Graphs API: WordPress Plugin: Blogroll Links
3. This Web Site is Now Hosted on Amazon EC2 & S3

As amongst the earliest adopters of both ASP and ASP.NET technologies (quote from Bill Gates), my personal web site’s move to Java in no way reflects a preference of Java over MS .NET. I like both platforms.

The templates for the pages on www.rajiv.com are powered by Tiles, a component of Struts. (Thanks to my colleague Magesh for suggesting it.) With the change from .NET and ASP to Struts and Tiles, the pages now have .htm extensions instead of .aspx and .asp. The old .aspx and .asp pages are redirected to the .htm ones using Apache’s mod_rewrite. The web pages on this site appear to be static html with the search-engine-friendly paths and page names ending in .htm, but internally they are dynamically assembled from components using Struts and Tiles.

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Related posts:

1. This Web Site is Now Hosted on Amazon EC2 & S3
2. Save Money On Hosting & CDN By Optimizing Your Architecture & Applications
3. Preserving URLs of Evergreen Content

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Related posts:

1. Google Web Toolkit: Develop and Test in Java, Deploy as AJAX
2. Social Graphs API: WordPress Plugin: Blogroll Links
3. Web site hosting provider and technologies change