I've inherited a WordPress site that runs on AWS. The site is a news/education site – mostly text, with some images.
Stats are as follows:
- ~200k users and ~500k pageviews/month
- Users located primarily in North America
- Peak simultaneous traffic is around ~300 users, I believe, at which point the site will be down. This happens every couple of months
- S3 media library is around ~400 GB
- Current monthly cost on AWS is ~USD$400: $200 for EC2, $100 for S3, $50 for EC2 – Other (?), $50 tax, $10 Virtual Private Cloud
Currently on AWS, there's a c5.xlarge instance for production and a t2.small instance for staging. Both are running Ubuntu, Apache2, Varnish. No idea if things are setup in an optimized manner, but probably not?
Ideally, I'd like to move to a managed solution that can simplify local/staging/prod devops, CDN setup, backups, tech support, etc. But I'm not opposed to learning how to setup everything – I have very basic server experience.
The only major requirement is the ability to scale-up when there is a traffic surge (and then go back down afterwards.) So a few questions:
- Does the current $400/mo AWS costs make sense based off my current stats?
- What are the best options for a managed solution? What should I expect to pay in terms of monthly costs?
- What cloud service would you recommend if I decided to set it up myself? What would the monthly costs be? And what would I need to setup?
For the managed solutions, I'm currently looking at Cloudways and Rocket.net, probably leaning towards the former?
For a custom server, I've used DigitalOcean before, which I was fairly happy with.
Thank you in advance for any help.
First thing First.
Do it in stages to see what else you need
Set up the CLOUDFLARE CDN
Their Pro Plan is only 25 dollars a month
With that you get a whole bunch of features.
Make sure your images are already optimized in WebP format
Sign up for Argo routing which will make your request very efficient. (Starts at 5 dollar a month
You can also sign up for their load balancer. Start with 2 or 3.
Honestly, I think that is all you need. Don’t touch the sever unless this set up is not enough.
Step 1) setup cloudflare 2) integrate caching or use Cloudways and have everything (and Cloudflare Enterprise, breeze caching, redis object cache,, immunify360, malcare, etc.) in a much easier to use dashboard for much cheaper and an easier overall experience.
AWS is quite expensive. You can get a cheaper VPS from Hetzner for around $50/month and use Runcloud to deploy your web apps on it.
I used to have a site getting 1 million pageviews a month and it was fine on a 4GB RAM DigitalOcean server on Cloudways. I still use Cloudways but have other sites on Runcloud + Hetzner or any VPS.