Amazon Cloud (AWS) Migrations and Support

Our website/forum just finished a mini-project to put our woes of the past behind us and move to the AWS hosting system. I cannot stress enough how impressed we were with the work Fly performed for us. It was top notch and he's a pleasure to work with, no doubt about it. He's one heck of a competent consultant who can be relied upon to deliver in every sense of the word. We are so satisfied with the responsiveness of our forum on the new system, that only an analogy will suffice. Remember when you replaced that mechanical drive in your PC/laptop with an SSD a few years ago? That same feeling when you first booted up is the same feeling you'll get when you make the switch. Pages load instantaneously and you will simply be amazed. The AWS console takes some getting used to but isn't too overly difficult, so for those used to cPanel it's a bit of a transition but one that can certainly be made without too much difficulty. We are very proud to be trail blazers and one of the select few forums who are now hosted in the Amazon Cloud. If you are contemplating a decision to make the switch, wait no longer because you will not be disappointed!
 
Our website/forum just finished a mini-project to put our woes of the past behind us and move to the AWS hosting system. I cannot stress enough how impressed we were with the work Fly performed for us. It was top notch and he's a pleasure to work with, no doubt about it. He's one heck of a competent consultant who can be relied upon to deliver in every sense of the word. We are so satisfied with the responsiveness of our forum on the new system, that only an analogy will suffice. Remember when you replaced that mechanical drive in your PC/laptop with an SSD a few years ago? That same feeling when you first booted up is the same feeling you'll get when you make the switch. Pages load instantaneously and you will simply be amazed. The AWS console takes some getting used to but isn't too overly difficult, so for those used to cPanel it's a bit of a transition but one that can certainly be made without too much difficulty. We are very proud to be trail blazers and one of the select few forums who are now hosted in the Amazon Cloud. If you are contemplating a decision to make the switch, wait no longer because you will not be disappointed!
We just finished migrating Owncloud file server to AWS, and I know exactly what you are talking about in regard to system responsiveness. It's a massive and very noticeable difference.

XF is on our list to migrate shortly. I'd appreciate it if you can provide me with an idea of the problems that you faced, or the major tasks that were req'd to perform to facilitate this migration. Thanks in advance.
 
I'd be interested in seeing a real-world cost comparison analysis of AWS vs traditional dedicated.
Looking at AWS pricing, I cannot see how it's cost effective. Using http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com and based on an m4.large with 750Gb traffic out I'd be paying $360 per month. (and I didn't get into EBS storage).
Now, I'm sure that is likely nowhere near what the best practice usage of AWS infrastructure is. Thus, I'd like to see how the optimal usage (or standard AWS config for an established XF site) and costing would be.
 
I'd be interested in seeing a real-world cost comparison analysis of AWS vs traditional dedicated.
Looking at AWS pricing, I cannot see how it's cost effective. Using http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com and based on an m4.large with 750Gb traffic out I'd be paying $360 per month. (and I didn't get into EBS storage).
Now, I'm sure that is likely nowhere near what the best practice usage of AWS infrastructure is. Thus, I'd like to see how the optimal usage (or standard AWS config for an established XF site) and costing would be.
That's probably not the best design, but assuming you did that your cost would be about $119/mo over the course of a year using reserve instances. You'll have to pay a chunk of that upfront, which is how reserves work. Depending on the site, there are more elegant and cheaper ways to do it as well.

edit: Fixed my terrible math.

Another edit: I just realized that we've chatted over PM about this. If you wanted to do the same setup out of Sydney, the total yearly cost spread out over 12 months is $279/mo. Sydney is apparently an expensive AWS datacenter.
 
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We just finished migrating Owncloud file server to AWS, and I know exactly what you are talking about in regard to system responsiveness. It's a massive and very noticeable difference.

XF is on our list to migrate shortly. I'd appreciate it if you can provide me with an idea of the problems that you faced, or the major tasks that were req'd to perform to facilitate this migration. Thanks in advance.

Actually the only hurdles we faced were due to customizations we had in place prior to the move. As with a lot of forums we're all volunteer staff, so finding the right person(s) with the right skill sets, and the available time to do the work was a bit of a challenge internally. Luckily Fly was able to fill the gaps and we were off to the races. He has the procedures down pat, tasks were organized and presented on company letterhead, and from everything I read in the AWS manuals it was done according to best practices. We finally have an email system that works and our bounces and rejects have dropped off dramatically. Overall an excellent experience!

I'd love to share the cost analysis with you @Mouth, unfortunately I'm not at liberty to do so, but I will say this. State of the art generally costs a little more, so if having the best appeals to you there are perks that come along with it. You could always spin up an EC2 instance and take it for a test drive paying close attention to the free tier offerings. Just a thought is all.
 
That's probably not the best design, but assuming you did that your cost would be about $119/mo over the course of a year using reserve instances. You'll have to pay a chunk of that upfront, which is how reserves work. Depending on the site, there are more elegant and cheaper ways to do it as well.

Can you please explain reserves. Thank you.
 
State of the art generally costs a little more, so if having the best appeals to you there are perks that come along with it
Thanks, but 3x the amount I pay now for what appears to be only convenience of having it as a single provider doesn't seem to warrant the change-over.
I really like the idea of AWS, but it doesn't seem to stack-up (from what I understand and can calculate costs)
 
Amazon seems like an ok option for a small board with couple hundred members online and few hundred thousand posts. But beyond that it can't compare to semi-dedicated shared hosting, beefy VPS or a quad core or higher dedicated server. I don't know of any even midsize 500k post boards that didn't revert back shortly after let alone any big boards utilizing it. That speaks a lot for it self if it can't handle a few million post board yet semi-dedicated hosting at a fraction of the cost can. Clouds are just simply the lastest over priced hype. They might be great for a static site, word press blog or a media wiki. But not something very database intense like a medium traffic or higher forum.
 
Amazon seems like an ok option for a small board with couple hundred members online and few hundred thousand posts. But beyond that it can't compare to semi-dedicated shared hosting, beefy VPS or a quad core or higher dedicated server. I don't know of any even midsize 500k post boards that didn't revert back shortly after let alone any big boards utilizing it. That speaks a lot for it self if it can't handle a few million post board yet semi-dedicated hosting at a fraction of the cost can. Clouds are just simply the lastest over priced hype. They might be great for a static site, word press blog or a media wiki. But not something very database intense like a medium traffic or higher forum.
(Emphasis mine)

With all due respect, that's completely false.
 
With all due respect, that's completely false.
It's nice to give respect, but if you want some back you'd need to give reasoning and/or explanation for your thoughts. I'm certainly interested in why you think so.
 
Amazon seems like an ok option for a small board with couple hundred members online and few hundred thousand posts. But beyond that it can't compare to semi-dedicated shared hosting, beefy VPS or a quad core or higher dedicated server. I don't know of any even midsize 500k post boards that didn't revert back shortly after let alone any big boards utilizing it. That speaks a lot for it self if it can't handle a few million post board yet semi-dedicated hosting at a fraction of the cost can. Clouds are just simply the lastest over priced hype. They might be great for a static site, word press blog or a media wiki. But not something very database intense like a medium traffic or higher forum.
I currently run my xF forum on two micro instances and I have over 1M posts.

edit: And Im pretty sure that Reddit still runs on AWS as well.
 
It's nice to give respect, but if you want some back you'd need to give reasoning and/or explanation for your thoughts. I'm certainly interested in why you think so.

I'm not sure he's the one who has something to prove. Given that AWS is running such sites as Reddit, Expedia, Pinterest, Airbnb, Netflix, etc. - not to mention, you know, Amazon itself - a piddly little 1m post XenForo forum is not exactly a heavy workload. And if someone believes that a 1m post board generates more database traffic than Reddit or Amazon, well, I have a bridge to sell you.

It's rather a silly thought process, isn't it? "Well, I know that this service is running some of the largest, highest-traffic sites on the entire internet, but please prove to me that it's capable of running my forum about cars."
 
So I've had a number of conversions with people here and elsewhere about AWS. One of the sticking points has always been that bandwidth tends to be a bit costly on AWS. I thought I would mention that last month, Amazon (unintentionally?) fixed that problem. In order to go more head to head with DigitialOcean, they created a GREATLY simplified control panel and pricing that pretty much matches what DO offers. Check it out here:

https://amazonlightsail.com/

These lightsail instances offer a good amount of bandwidth, for not a lot of money. And although there is no mention of it really, each of these 'droplets' support VPC peering, which means they can communicate with the rest of your AWS infrastructure.
 
So I've had a number of conversions with people here and elsewhere about AWS. One of the sticking points has always been that bandwidth tends to be a bit costly on AWS. I thought I would mention that last month, Amazon (unintentionally?) fixed that problem. In order to go more head to head with DigitialOcean, they created a GREATLY simplified control panel and pricing that pretty much matches what DO offers. Check it out here:

https://amazonlightsail.com/

These lightsail instances offer a good amount of bandwidth, for not a lot of money. And although there is no mention of it really, each of these 'droplets' support VPC peering, which means they can communicate with the rest of your AWS infrastructure.
have you used lightsail yourself ?

lightsail has too much cpu contention and poor disk i/o though - honestly not suited for forum usage
 
I haven't yet had much time to play around with them yet. Honestly, my thought initially was to take advantage of AWS offerings for a traditional cloud infrastructure, then basically use the Lightsail boxes as reverse proxies, specifically for the cheap bandwidth. In that scenario, I don't *much* care about cpu contention and disk i/o, and I get to take advantage of all the other AWS features.
 
Hello i am new to AWS Cloud Front and Google Cloud CDN . traditional cdn providers just gives me pull zones and its done but i am unable to figure our how can i integrate Amazon Cloud Front to load my CSS / JS / images from amazon CDN can you help me out
 
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