It is known that WordPress is the most popular open-source blogging and content management system (CMS) framework. Based on PHP and MySQL, it is the most used content publishing platform. Started just as a blogging platform, today WordPress powers millions of websites. It is continuously evolving as a CMS for small blogs to enterprise websites.

Source: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS47685521

Thanks to the huge cloud web services supporting WordPress on-demand cloud hosting globally with a large set of Server Infrastructures, APIs, and web services, that constantly expanding WordPress as a highly capable CMS solution. The power of WordPress as a content platform can be more leveraged using advanced cloud storage servers like AWS.

Combining WordPress with AWS cloud can serve unmatched capabilities. AWS cloud server can provide massive global cloud infrastructure to ensure your website runs smoothly during high-traffic surges. It instantly scales as needed with increased workloads.

Now let’s deep dive into how to install WordPress on AWS Cloud. We will go through some technical details to explain the overall configuration.

Source: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-cloud-hosting-providers-wordpress/

Prerequisites

When you are ready to start, at first you will need to register for AWS. The process starts by creating and verifying your AWS account using a credit card. You will be charged $1 and receive a verification code via SMS.

Now, select the free support plan and get ready. You will get access to your console and the journey starts.

Easy & Robust Architecture for WordPress on AWS Cloud Server

AWS provides various options for provisioning virtual machines. There are three ways you can host your WordPress website on AWS server

Amazon Lightsail

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

AWS Marketplace

Amazon Lightsail is a service that allows you to quickly launch a virtual private server (A Lightsail instance) to host a WordPress website. Lightsail is a good option to get started at the initial stage if you are not willing for highly configurable instances.

The second option that AWS provides is the Amazon EC2. It allows resizable compute capacity so you can launch a virtual server just in a few minutes. It provides more options than the Lightsail, like higher configuration and management, which is suitable for more advanced architectures. You can easily install any software package, including WordPress, using your administrative access.

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with a huge listing from independent software vendors, where you can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS. Preconfigures WordPress images can be directly launched to Amazon EC2 in your AWS account using 1-Click deployment just in a few mins. You can find a number of vendors that offer ready-to-launch WordPress instances.

Hosting a ready WordPress website on AWS EC2

In this section, you will learn how to deploy and host WordPress on an AWS server. While hosting WordPress, for a production workload with minimal management responsibilities, you need to implement an architecture. You can use AWS ElasticBeanstalk and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to accomplish this.

Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles everything from deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and health monitoring once you have uploaded the WordPress files. Amazon RDS is cost-effective and provides resizable capacity. It is capable of managing time-consuming database administration tasks for you.

You can know in more detail about deploying a WordPress Website on AWS using this link.

How to host and configure a WordPress instance on AWS Lightsail

We would recommend using Lightsale to get started for developers, small online businesses, students and other users who are looking for a simple virtual private server (VPS) solution. It abstracts many complex elements of infrastructure management away from the user.

So, for beginners with less requirement and infrastructure experience, it is an ideal solution. As at this stage you need to focus on running your website with just a few products and comparatively fewer data or content. Using Amazon Lightsail, you can deploy and configure WordPress with a single click choosing operating systems like Windows or Linux/Unix.

You can smoothly extend and connect to additional AWS database, object storage, caching, and content distribution services as your needs grow.

Below is the Implementation guide for deploying a WordPress Website with Lightsail:

WordPress Best Practices on AWS Cloud

As your site keeps growing it makes more sense to use AWS cloud leveraging its powerful advantages. Continue reading to know some best practices to host WordPress on AWS.

Monitoring with CloudWatch Logs

Amazon CloudWatch Logs stores all your monitoring data in one central location. Files can be saved, managed and accessed from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Route 53, and AWS CloudTrail, among others. You can correct problems by searching and filtering the information.

Scaling on LightSail

Scalability is essential to the success of your website. Small websites typically start on the AWS LightSail server, but if your traffic snowballs, you’ll quickly reach the established limit.

Fortunately, Amazon prepared for this by building in some helpful features for vertical scaling. Light Sail has an instance feature that can assist you in adding RAM or bandwidth to accommodate higher traffic.

Horizontal scaling requires more planning, but once again, there’s a specific tool to help. This time, it’s the AWS Load Balancer. Adding new servers helps keep things running smoothly with AWS Load Balancer.

Offloading Files to Improve Speed

Static data, like images and video, can bog down your site. Practically you can resolve this issue with offloading.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides a place you can save any amount of data.

It allows you to control your information which you can organize and set rules for accessing them.

WordPress also offers a plugin called W3 Total Cache that can optimize your storage. This add-on provides an improved experience for site users by increasing performance and reducing load times.

Security Certificates

You need to install an SSL/TLS certificate on your website to ensure that it remains secure. If you are dealing with financial transactions on your website, you must pay for it.

Temporarily you can go for the free ones, but free certificates typically expire after 90 days, so you need to renew them again.

Conclusion

Both WordPress and AWS are leaders in their areas. The combined use of these platforms have many benefits and is increasing day by day. WordPress offers seamless content publishing and management, while AWS offers better uptime, speed, scalability, and security than shared hosting.

AWS presents many architecture options for running WordPress. The easiest option for low-traffic websites is a single server installation. For high-traffic and complex websites, site administrators can go for more advanced options to maintain scalability and a seamless experience.

It depends on the features needed to fulfill the requirements and budget. If still you have confusion and want to know more, connect with us any time. We are an official AWS certified consulting company with years of experience in WordPress development.

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With cloud computing at its prime, many developers have contested to claim supremacy in the cloud domain. Azure and AWS have been relentless and taken the top honours for a while now.

However, the question that bothers most of the developers is which cloud vendor to choose? In this article on AWS vs Azure, we would be comparing these cloud giants to help you figure out what suits your business needs better.

What is AWS used for?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering to compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Running web and application servers in the cloud to host dynamic websites.

What is Azure in simple terms?

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework.

AWS vs Azure-What are the key differences?

Cloud service providers Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure have more in common than you might think. Cloud storage companies touch the lives of millions offering the world a better place. Azure and AWS are superheroes on their own but in the battle of clouds, who’s on top?

This superficial glance might help you to lead an unprecedented edge over Azure, but a deeper look will prove the decision that isn’t easy. To determine the best cloud storage provider, you need to consider multiple differences which are as follows.

General Features

The following table provides a detailed look of general features of these giants.

Now you know the general overview of both software, let’s take a look at some pricing factors.

Pricing

Both Azure and AWS pricing models offer pay as you go structure. AWS charges you on an hourly basis whereas Azure charges you on a per-minute basis.

Azure is ideal when it comes to short term subscription plans. It gives you more flexibility. In case of services, Azure tends to be costlier than AWS for scaling up the site.

Compute

The next halt in cloud service is a computing parameter. Computation or cloud environment is one of the core services when it comes to cloud computing, which is understandable as we have the word compute in the term cloud computing.

While large data is being generated these days, there is always a need for faster means of processing. Compute services ensure you can spawn instances in minutes and scale up instances instantly if needed. Azure and AWS both have such services that cater to these needs.

Storage

Both cloud computing services offer long-running and reliable storage services. AWS has services like EBS, Glacier, AWS S3 while Azure offers services like Blob Storage, Standard Archive, Disk storage.

When it comes to storage, AWS S3 ensures high availability and automatic replication across regions. When it comes to temporary storage in AWS, it starts functioning each time the instance starts and stops. With Azure, it uses temporary storage and page blobs for VM volume. It also offers block storage as the counterpart to AWS S3.

Both giants offer hot and cold storage. So, this was about storage, now let’s take a look in terms of database services.

Databases

The data being generated these days comes in different formats, hence the databases that hold this data also need to evolve. AWS and Azure both provide different database services to handle both structured and unstructured data.

If you are looking for durability AWS has Amazon RDS whereas Azure has Azure SQL Server Database. Amazon RDS supports different database engines like MariaDB, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle whereas when it comes to Azure, SQL Server Database is based on SQL as the name suggests.

Networking Services

Amazon Virtual private cloud commonly known as VPC allows users to isolate networks under the cloud umbrella. This lets users create subnets, private IP, network gateways and route tables.

While on the other hand, Azure enables you to do all the stuff similar to VPC. Both the cloud storage giants have the solutions to extend the on-premise data centre into the cloud and firewall options as well.

Container and Orchestration Support

As per the above discussion, AWS offers more matured Big Data and Analytics offerings. It has various services in its arsenal that cover domains like the Internet of Things, web and mobile app development, and cloud computing environments.

Microsoft takes a step here as it offers Hadoop support services with Azure HDInsight. Azure with Window Server 2016 offers integration with Docker for both Window and Hyper-V containers.

Compliance

Amazon has a good relationship with the governments ensuring better cloud storage for the government. They also provide great security measurements ensuring proper access to individual users when it comes to accessing the cloud. This factor is important when companies need to deal with sensitive data.

On the other note, Microsoft offers more than 50 complaint offerings including ITAR, HIPAA, FIPS and DISA. This makes its security level neck-to-neck with AWS.

Is AWS better than Microsoft Azure?

Both Cloud platforms as seen above show potent capabilities and it is difficult to pick a clear winner. Azure is great when it comes to Hybrid Cloud and integrating with Microsoft stack of products, whereas AWS has more flexibility and extra features. It very much boils down to the requirements you or your organization has.

According to the recent Gartner report it is stated that the market for cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) continues to consolidate as customers and vendors push for more security, innovation, and scale. For the ninth year in a row, AWS is evaluated as the Leader in cloud IaaS with the highest score in both axes of measurement, Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.

AWZ provides application developers with the environment, tools, thus giving them building blocks which they need to build and establish new cloud services quickly. It also provides essential ‘dev ops’ connections which are important for managing, monitoring, and continuously fine-tuning those apps. With AWS S3, much of the infrastructure management is taken care of behind the scenes by Microsoft. Thus, you have a 100% focus on innovation if you develop cloud computing with AWS.

Conclusion

Choosing the right cloud vendor is very much essential and an important decision for the enterprises. Both Azure and AWS are similar in offering PaaS capabilities for virtual networking, storage, and machines.

However, AWS gives stronger and faster PaaS capabilities which nowadays is a more important part of Cloud infrastructure. Perception Systems, as the leading certified AWS provider, offer unmatched and flawless development. Many enterprises have observed steady business growth by choosing us as their certified AWS partner. As a result, AWS happens to be the better choice compared to Azure because of its hybrid solutions, flexibility, extensive support for Linux, and better long-term pricing models. 

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