Lightsail & WordPress – The best practices

There are lots of solutions out there to host WordPress sites. For long I have been using NFO Servers. Its quiet cheap. But since its a shared server the speed of my site was too slow. If it was a personal site just used to share information NFO Servers was perfect. But our company is a Ecommerce site catering to the universe 🙂 So speed is essential. If I were to choose from other solutions then Hostinger and MilesWeb were better options. These offer cheap managed WordPress site.

But what is Managed WordPress hosting vs Shared WordPress Hosting?

Imagine shared web hosting like a dormitary. Its one single room where everyone shares a bed. All the resources of that single room is shared by everyone who stays there. Where as Managed WordPress hosting is like an apartment with different rooms. Each can house one person or a family. And this each family can increase or decrease the resources based on their financial position / need. Like one family in a room can have an Air Conditoner where was the other can have a UPS for their home.

Similary in Shared WordPress Hosting shares a single server. The resource of that server is equally distributed to all the websites that are hosted in that server. So if the hosting provider decides to host more websites in one single server then the resources available to each website will be less and hence the website can become slow. But it is cheaper and its best suited for personal websites or blogs where speed isn’t a necessity.

In a Managed WordPress site each website administrator can purchase resources according to their need. They can increase the number of CPU units, Storage space and bandwidth limit based on the type of website and the traffic it attracts. Its perfect for webapps and app development. The adminstrator can define the down time and scale it up or down based on the requirement. Services like Hostar using this method when Cricket matches are telecasted. Based on the number of users viewing they increase and decrease the number of servers on the fly.

So why AWS and what is Lightsail?

Among the popular hosting services described above, AWS shined brigther for the following reasons.

1. For the value of money that we were paying they gave more resources that their competitors
2. We wanted a speedy website for our customer but did not want to break the bank. So the $5 starting server served well.
3. Familarity with other AWS services. We have always used S3 bucket services and EC2 services so it was easier for us to understand the AWS enviroment. This is a personal experience. But if you are starting new the AWS could have a learning curve.
4. Security again Phising attacks and website virus is very less. In the past years of working with AWS we never had any such issues with AWS.
5. WordPress seems to be secure when there is no direct way to access the files. We have to SSH our way into their server. The same goes to accessing the database.

In AWS you can create your own Linux server using EC2 service. But this is like giving a blank computer. After which we have to install Apache service to run the website. Open the ports and so on. While this offers greater flexibility to mange the virtual computer on AWS its a headache when all we wanted was to host the website. Thats where Lightsail comes. Its a pre-packaged server. Its single an individual server where we can choose our resources. But it comes with preinstalled applications like Apache, LAMP and WordPress or Drupal or Ghost and many more. This helps us to directly start building our website instead of worrying about setting up the server. Thats why we love AWS Lightsail.

The best practices that we follow when hosting with AWS Lightsail

1. Create a server closer to your user’s location. If you know most of your users come from a particular country then create the server closer to that location. Still the internet is moved through physical wires under the sea before being transmitted wireless. Moving servers close to the user will increase speed by many milliseconds.
2. Create a Static Public IP address and link the server to it. Every time the Lightsail server is restarted it generate a new available open IP address. If this IP address is linked to any domain then the website will become unavailble when the server is restarted. Because each restart changes the IP address. That why Static Public address is importat. It links to the server and never changes. That way the server is always linked to the domain using static IP.
3. Create snapshots or backups of the server. Make it automatic. Lightsail by default unless enabled offeres 7 days of snapshots. What are snapshots? There are a copy of your entire server so they take up space. And you will be charged for this space. But it is worth it. Because at any point you can convert these snapshots into its own server. This will be particularly helpful during a server crash. In the even of a crash a recent snapshot can be created to a server and then linked to the existing static ip address. It would help bring the website back up online in minutes.