Amazon Site Hosting - Hosting a website on Amazon

Hosting a website on Amazon

Amazon cloud provides affordable hosting for any kind of websites.

Looking for alternative web hosting

Burstnet

The skimmiest VPS at Burstnet costs £60 a year, $94. The price is normal, their customer service good. Down side is bad neighbourhood - on the same node sits someone who eats up all resources time to time and leaves other hosts in outage for hours. Burstnet refuses to relocate you, all right, let’s try our luck elsewhere.

InterServer.net

InterServer.net - Memory 376MB Storage 25GB Traffic 3mbps / 900GB Monthly $6

Amazon

Amazon cloud. Amazon EC2 Micro Instance, instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.

Micro Instance

613 MB memory

Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)

EBS storage only

32-bit or 64-bit platform

I/O Performance: Low

API name: t1.micro

Is that small amount of consistent CPU resources sufficient for me?

After a month of hosting websites on Amazon (13 dynamic websites) the CPU usage has peaked to 60% only twice. Usually the CPU usage fluctuates around 15%.

Amazon hosting prices

There are three Reserved Instance types (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances) that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price. All the same, just the price is composed by different ways. Amazon hosting prices

Micro Reserved Instances

3 yr Term $100

Linux/UNIX Usage $0.005 per hour

Traffic

First 1 GB / month $0.000 per GB

Up to 10 TB / month $0.120 per GB

Amazon EBS Volumes

$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage

$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests

Amazon EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3

$0.14 per GB-month of data stored

No cost for Elastic IP addresses while in use.

The scariest with Amazon hosting prices is that pay-as-much-you-consume principle. What's the bill at the end of day? In reality, the utility cost came out to be around $9 per month. $100 / 3 / 12 + $9 = $12 month. 13 websites, that makes Amazon hosting to cost less than a dollar per month per domain.

Setting up Amazon site hosting

Amazon EC2 Server Setup Guide

Open an account

We have this email already.

Forgotten password. To avoid the humiliation of clicking this link - this password is the same as login for the Amazon Store (books, christmas jumpers etc.).

New password

Launch Amazon EC2 instance

To start using Amazon EC2 you will want to launch a virtual server, known as an Amazon EC2 instance.

Region US East

Pro - market is there.

Pro - cheaper Linux/UNIX Usage, 0.005 vs 0.008 = £16.6 a year.

Con - US jurisdiction, SOPA, PIPA... you never know theose cowboys.

Click on “Launch Instance”. “Reserved Instances”, purchase one.

EC2

Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances

Micro Reserved Instances

Linux/UNIX

t1.micro

Heavy Utilisation

Availability Zone us-east–1a

Tenancy DEfault

Term 3 years

Quantity 1

One-time fee $100

Hourly $0.005

Click Purchase to place your order.

Thank you for your order. It may take a few minutes for your Reserved Instances to change from ‘pending’ to ‘active’ as we process the request.

Launch AWS Instance

Amazon Web Services Sign In

Please enter the AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM) User name and password assigned by your system administrator to sign in. Your IAM User sign-in URL is...

Absolute First Step Tutorial for Amazon Web Services

Security groups

Default security group allows any access, probably. Create own security group and open the firewall for just services necessary.

Security Groups. 0.0.0.0/0 means the entire Internet, all IP addresses.

SSH (port 22 gets attached automatically)
HTTP (port 80 gets attached automatically)
ICMP Echo Request (to allow ping and tracert)

Log in to your web server

For initial (first time) log in to newly created instances one must use SSH public/private key pairs.

Managing an Amazon EC2 Instance Using PuTTY SSH

You can not log in to your instance [ec2–50–19–183–55.compute–1.amazonaws.com] as a root, use ec2-user instead.

ec2-user@ec2-50-19-183-55.compute–1.amazonaws.com See /usr/share/doc/system-release/ for latest release notes. There are 14 security update(s) out of 18 total update(s) available.

Update the system

AWS update commands.

$ yum update

$ yum upgrade

Packages built to run on CentOS should also run on the Amazon Linux AMI that is based on Redhat.

$ sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

PermitRootLogin yes

PasswordAuthentication yes

$ /etc/init.d/sshd reload

$ sudo passwd root

Get and assign an IP address.

Get an IP address and assign it to your instance.

IP and Amazon EC2. Through the AWS Management Console. To ensure our customers are efficiently using Elastic IP addresses, we impose a small hourly charge when these IP addresses are not mapped to an instance. When these IP addresses are mapped to an instance, they are free of charge.

You do not have any Elastic IP addresses allocated. Click the Allocate New Address button to reserve an Elastic IP address.

Address: 107.22.197.163

Associate address

After that you can’t log in with ec2–50–19–183–55.compute–1.amazonaws.com any longer. Use the real IP - 107.22.197.163

Web server

Apache

$ yum install httpd

$ /etc/init.d/httpd start

Browser http://107.22.197.163

Returns the Amazon Linux AMI Test Page

Amazon site hosting works!

Further configure Apache and set up virtual hosts, do iptables, PHP, SQL, copy the stuff over and get it all work, DNS.

AWS = Amazon Web Services. VPS = Virtual Private Server. Amazon EC2 = Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Web Server, Amazon web server, Amazon Site Hosting. AMI = Amazon Machine Image, a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

2012

Web Management - Hosting a website on Amazon is an elegant and cost effective option.

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