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Hosting on AWS
I have just been requested by a client to have their site hosted on AWS. I haven't deployed a PHP/MySQL style site to aws, so I have a few concerns.
What is the best way to set up an instance? The Wordpress instructions say to use EC2, but that has an install script which seems to do everything, it doesn't say anything about uploading any files.
In the docs, it seems like using an S3 bucket is only available in perch runway? We have quite a few downloads and images that would be best to be hosted there.
My only experience on AWS is through the terminal, but with Perch everything has been done with FileZilla. Can we upload files like we are used to? Or do we need to change our workflow?
Any experiences will help.
Cheers.
I don't have any direct experience, I would suggest using some sort of deployment service anyhow rather than FTP.
It may be that another customer does so I'll leave this here in the hope that someone can chip in.
Just an idea but maybe try to track down a VPS/hosting provider that hosts their services on AWS infrastructure, then at least you'll have a familiar interface and set of tools to work with - and your client gets what they want in terms of AWS redundancy.
I've got a little bit of experience using AWS so I'll drop in with my thoughts here.
As far as I know, you're correct in thinking that S3 buckets only exist in Runway.
With regards to hosting a PHP/MySQL site on their infrastructure, there's a few different options available to you:
ElasticBeanstalk
This is designed as a quick start method of setting up infrastructure for a website of drastically varying load. This would entail EC2 and RDS instance(s), usually with Elastic Block Storage rather than S3. This setup would allow you to easily horizontally scale the website if the demand were to exceed capacity of the servers.
Plain EC2
You could go down the approach of just setting up an EC2 instance, which is essentially a normal VPS. Managing this would be no different to a traditional VPS, you'd need to manually install MySQL etc.
Amazon Lightsail
If you were considering the plain EC2 instance route, then it may be worth checking this option out also. Lightsail is Amazon's competitor to DigitalOcean-like services. Like plain EC2, you have complete control of the server and management of it. It may satisfy your client's request to host on AWS without the complexity of the full multitude of AWS products.
This all depends on what kind of traffic levels your client expects and whether it will be constant, or has potential to spike massively without prior warning. If you're looking at deploying a complex site, I'd recommend building it as a Runway site regardless of which infrastructure route you take - at least it covers you for the future.