If you want your WordPress website to be successful, you need to choose the right hosting provider! In this article, I'll walk you through the pros and cons of hosting WordPress on AWS. Then, I'll show you how to launch a website with Amazon Lightsail.
By choosing the right provider, you'll enjoy faster load times, better SEO, and less downtime, and you'll avoid many of the headaches associated with managing a high-performance WordPress site.
There are countless WordPress hosting providers out there, but in this article, we're going to focus on Lightsail from Amazon. We'll explore the pros and cons of choosing Amazon as your hosting provider, before showing you how to launch a website using Lightsail. Even if you have no prior experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), by the end of this article, you will have configured and launched a WordPress website, using Amazon's Lightsail.
Note that Lightsail is not the best option for everyone. If you want to compare with another WordPress hosting provider, check out our article on the 9 best cloud hosting Dynomoon.
And if our pros and cons section makes you doubt that Lightsail is really the best option for your website, we'll also look at another hosting provider.
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What Are Amazon Web Services Used For?
AWS is an on-demand cloud computing platform that provides access to large-scale cloud computing capacity, without requiring you to build your own physical server farm.
While AWS is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis, subscription fees vary depending on the hardware, software, and networking features you choose, as well as your availability, security, and service requirements.
AWS is an umbrella term for hundreds of cloud services. As of February 2020, Amazon offered more than 200 distinct AWS products, with more expected to be launched throughout the year.
While too numerous to cover in this article, some of the notable AWS products include:
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Provides a computer data storage architecture that manages data as objects, making Amazon S3 ideal for backup and recovery, data archiving, and hybrid cloud storage. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure as Amazon.com.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Provides access to a virtual cluster of computers delivered with pre-loaded application software, including databases and web servers.
AWS Lambda. This is a serverless, event-driven computing platform designed to create on-demand applications that execute code in response to specific events. Lambda automatically manages the computing resources needed to run your code, making it an ideal solution for provisioning back-end services triggered in response to HTTP requests, and then automatically deprovisioning those resources when they are no longer needed.
In this tutorial, we'll focus on one AWS product in particular - Amazon Lightsail.
What Is Amazon Lightsail?
Lightsail is a cloud-based platform that provides everything you need to deploy and host your WordPress website, including instances, managed databases, static IP addresses, and load balancers. While we focus on using Lightsail to launch your WordPress instance, you can also use Lightsail to deploy small-scale web applications, enterprise software, developer sandboxes, and test environments.
Lightsail is very popular among WordPress users, but it is not the only choice for hosting a WordPress website. Before we show you how to install WordPress and launch your website on Amazon Lightsail, let's make sure it's the right platform for you by looking at its strengths and weaknesses.
WordPress AWS Cost
Hosting a WordPress website on an AWS instance is very easy. In addition, you can host your WordPress website on an Amazon AWS web server for one year at no cost.
Note that even after one year, you can host your WordPress website on an AWS web server for the lowest cost.
AWS Lightsail WordPress: The Pros
Let's start with the positive, and look at the reasons why you might want to opt for Lightsail over other WordPress hosting services. It's the cloud hosting provider with the largest market share by far. AWS is such a successful platform that it accounts for half of Amazon's operating revenue, which translates into billions of dollars.
Tech giants like Netflix and Apple rely on AWS for their web services. So, if you decide to use this platform to host your WordPress website, you will be in good company.
1. A Beginner-Friendly Solution
Lightsail is designed to help new users get familiar with AWS.
Lightsail's management console provides easy access to all the basic AWS configuration options, so you can set up your server, static IP addresses, and DNS (Domain Name System) settings without the help of a specialist. If you are an individual or run a small business that does not have a system administrator, you can easily use Lightsail to create, deploy and maintain a self-hosted WordPress website.
Using Lightsail, you can usually get a host online in minutes, even if you have no prior experience with AWS.
2. It has a fixed monthly limit
With Lightsail, you pay an hourly rate for the resources you consume, up to a pre-set maximum monthly cost.
At the time of this writing, Lightsail subscriptions ranged from $3.50 to $240 per month, although plans that include a Windows Server license are significantly higher than comparable plans for Linux and UNIX. In addition, any outbound data transfer that exceeds your plan's data transfer limit will be subject to additional charges.
3. A flexible solution
What happens if your website exceeds its Lightscale subscription? If you need more resources, you can increase your RAM and storage capacity at any time by migrating to a new Lightsail instance. Alternatively, if you need to cut costs or save resources, you can upgrade to a smaller Lightsail instance.
While migrations are supported, Lightsail does not offer one-click migration. If you upgrade your Lightsail plan to a larger instance, you will need to take a snapshot and create a larger instance from that snapshot. If you're migrating to a smaller instance, you'll need to back up your data to an alternative AWS service, start a smaller Lightsail instance, and then manually migrate all of your data to that new instance.
AWS Lightsail WordPress: The Cons
While Lightsail has many positives, there are a few drawbacks that make it unsuitable for some use cases.
Could another hosting platform be a better fit for your WordPress website?
In this section, we will explore some of the disadvantages of opting for Amazon's Lightsail platform.
1. It's not self-scaling
While you can upgrade to a larger Lightscale instance at any time, Lightscale doesn't create additional instances when certain criteria are met, and it doesn't scale down resources when they are no longer needed.
If you're building a personal website or your site isn't business-critical, this lack of agility may not be a big problem, but it makes Lightscale unsuitable for businesses or websites with fluctuating workloads.
If you need an enterprise-ready platform that automatically adapts to your website's demands and can handle large fluctuations in traffic, you may want to look for an Amazon Lightsail alternative.
2. You have to pay extra for technical support
By default, all Lightsail users are entitled to the basic support package, which provides access to official AWS documentation, white papers, and supports forms. This basic support package also includes 24/7 customer service, but it's important to note that this is not technical support.
If you need technical support, you will need to purchase a separate support package, which at the time of writing ranged from $29 to $15,000 per month.
Lightsail is simple to set up and maintain, so it's unlikely that you'll need technical support, but if you do run into a problem, you'll either need to purchase a dedicated support package or resolve the issue yourself.
If your WordPress website is critical to your business or if you plan to implement advanced or complex features, you should plan to purchase an additional support package or opt for another Amazon Lightsail alternative that provides technical support as standard.
Buying A Domain Name
The first step in launching a successful website is to register a domain name.
As a general rule, you should choose a domain name that is easy to spell, pronounce and remember, includes keywords related to the content of your website, and does not include numbers or hyphens.
There are countless domain name registrars, but the most popular are:
Hosting WordPress On AWS
Lightsail WordPress Tutorial
- Log into the Lightsail console.
- Select the Instances tab.
- Lightsail should automatically detect your AWS region and availability zone, but you can change these values, if necessary.
- Under Choose your instance image, choose Linux / Unix.
- Under Select a blueprint, choose WordPress.
- Under Choose an instance blueprint, select the blueprint you want to use. At the time of this writing, you can try Lightsail for free for 30 days.
- Give your Lightsail instance a unique name.
- Click Create Instance.
- In the Lightsail console, select the Instances tab.
- Find the instance you just created and click on the SSH quick login icon that comes with it. The browser-based SSH client will now launch in a new window.
- In the Lightsail console, select your WordPress instance.
- Select the Networking tab.
- Select Create Static IP.
- Open the Attach to Instance drop-down list and select the WordPress instance you created earlier.
- In Identify your static IP, give your static IP address a unique name.
- Click on Create.
Next, we need to map a domain name to our Amazon Lightsail instance:
- In the Lightsail console, select the Networking tab.
- Select Create DNS Zone.
- Find Enter the domain you have registered, and enter your domain name.
- Select Create DNS Zone.
- Log in to the GoDaddy domain control center.
- Select your domain name.
- Choose Manage DNS
- In the Nameservers section, select Change.
- Check the box I'll use my own nameservers.
- Remove all default GoDaddy name servers.
- Select Add Name Server.
- Copy/paste the Lightsail nameservers into the GoDaddy console and click Save.
Now you need to map your domain root to your Lightsail instance:
- If the networking screen is not already open, navigate to the Lightsail > Networking console and select your WordPress instance.
- In the DNS records section, click on Add Record.
- In the Subdomain box, enter the @ character, as this means that you are mapping the root of your domain, not a subdomain.
- Select the Resolves to box, and from the next drop-down list, choose the static IP address you have attached to this instance of WordPress.
- Save your changes by clicking on the green checkmark.
Conclusion
