Amazon AWS/Cloud services for web hosting

[Alex Faundez]

Hello everyone,

I am looking for alternatives to my expensive web hosting service I am paying a fortune but rarely using.

I'd like to migrate to a cheaper solutions that allows me to set up small websites (PHP, MySQL mainly) for testing purposes.

Does anyone have any good recommendation?

What about Amazon Web Services? Is it any good?

Thank you in advance, and Happy 2016!

Alex Faundez about.me/alex.faundez

Content strategist and online communications specialist
faunde...@gmail.com

Founder of Geneva Content Strategy Meetup

alexandr...@unctad.org // unctad.org

[Neil Hepburn]

Hi,

I can recommend digitalocean.com -  you can spin up a LAMP box (droplet)  and then only pay for when it's active.  So if you only need it for a few days, you will only pay for that. If you leave it constantly active the configurations start at only $5/month.  Big plus is it's your own private server.  They have various "out-of-the-box" configs Drupal, Django, LAMP etc etc for one-click setups.  

Interface is super clear and easy to use.

Neil 

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[Niall Mc Phillips]

Hi Alex,

I've had very positive experiences using Amazon EC2 machines as development and in production.

You can start a machine and pay per hour for the time that it is running or you can pay less for a "reserved instance" that runs all the time.  It just like having your own server except that you can't physically touch it.

All the best.

Niall.

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[Laurent Pitoiset]

Hello,

After some extensive research from our IT division I am also currently in the process of migrating some of our main UNHCR websites to AWS (EC2, RDS, Redis, elastic search as a service, etc.). There is a whole range of available preset technologies, everything is easy to setup and scales up according to requirements, so far so good. 

Cheers,

Laurent

[Juan Convers]

Hey Alex,

I have been registering my domains with Gandi and for a couple of years I have been using their "simple hosting" solution and I'm really happy so far:

https://www.gandi.net/hosting/simple?language=php&db=mysql

At the beginning I was using just a simple PHP / MySQL instance and it was quite straightforward to use. Lately I have playing around with a Nodejs / MongoDB instance and it works fine as well.

Take care,

-Juan

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[gbau]

Hello !

I use virtual machines at fheberg.com, exoscale.ch, ovh.com and vultr.com depending on requirements about security, location, availability and DDoS-proofing.

This translates into a cost that goes from 1.50€/month to 18CHF/month for a basic VPS with Web server, database, cache and queue.

The most useful tip I could give you is to use services like forge.laravel.com and deploybot.com to automatically spin new servers (ie installing all software, configuring SSH/SSL/varnish/load balancers) and automatically deploy the new version of your code without client-side interruption. Adding something like codeship.com in between allow all your tests to run as a safeguard before going "live". 

With all this, you can go from idea to testable POC on a cheap VPS in a matter of minutes !

Cheers,

Guillaume 

[dani]

Alex, 

If you want a place for development I second http://digitalocean.com 

It is very flexible, you have a virtual machine, you have images, backups, you can switch it on off... and make it big or small and choose where it is located. Not very expensive. Much simpler than Amazon. Uses SSD Hard Drives so it is fast.

I use it for several production sites. 

If you want cheap hosting for a blog then shared hosting is just fine. I have my blog on http://hostgator.com which costs something like 4 usd per month and you have unlimited bandwidh, space... I have been with them for ages. No problem.

For a "work" site, then you might want Amazon cloud (but it is not cheap, and it is hard to configure/understand). Very complicated to know how much you are going to pay.

Also with fanatical support, so you basically don't care about anything, they do everything for you, I have used with IFRC (also used by UNOCHA), http://blackmesh.com Not cheap, but no worries. Also http://rackspace.com not cheap but excellent support, and based on Open Stack which is good. 

Good luck!

Daniel

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[Yvan]

Hello,

As others suggested for quick deploy of development machine I suggest going with DigitalOcean, it’s cheap and really nice.

At Le Temps, we host our website at www.platform.sh.Those guys take care of everything and any technology, with a great emphasis for Drupal and Symfony, but anything else is also available.

Compared to Rackspace or AWS you can make up to 60% save on your costs.

They recently launched a Datacenter in Switzerland if this is a requirement for you.

-- Yvan

[Alex Faundez]

Thanks Yvan and those who replied.

It looks like digital ocean is a winner (at least for my needs). Gandi.net offers interesting (and cheap) services as well.

To give you a bit of background: I am currently hosting my personal site which I also use as test/demo environment for a few personal projects, but it’s way too expensive for my current needs. 

Cheers,

a

Alex Faundez about.me/alex.faundez

Content strategist and online communications specialist
faunde...@gmail.com

Founder of Geneva Content Strategy Meetup

alexandr...@unctad.org // unctad.org

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