I was wondering if anyone has any experience with hosting an Umbraco site with Amazon EC2. Their offer seems to good to be true and what I gather from their website is I would be able to run 1 Umbraco website constantly for a whole month (database and all) for free using their AWS free tier.
I notice that in the recommended providers for Umbraco hosting EC2 appears as a recommended cloud host however their website is very confusing as rather than talking about clear pricing they speak in terms of load and usage which I guess is variable really.
I guess my question is would I be able to get away with using their free AWS tier to host a fairly small Umbraco portfolio site for a year or do you think I would start to hit charges etc.
I only ask because Umbraco requires full trust and to get this with most other hosting providers you need to shell out for dedicated hosting which is fine if you are a business but as a personal user it really is just too steep.
Any feedback or experiences with regards to this would be much appreciated.
Firstly, I wouldn't consider the free tier for trying to run an EC2 windows instance. The EC2 Micro instance (which is what is part of the free tier) just isn't powerful enough in my experience to run Windows, let alone a website on it.
However, other than the instance issue, We've been running Umbraco sites on AWS for a while.
Currently our sites just sit on an EC2 instance with a local SQL install, however I am currently looking at using EC2 instances with fail over and the RDS as a more robust set up.
I would also highly recomend reading an understanding AWS best practice and the rules surrounding instance configuration and EBS set up (EBS is what is used for storage in EC2)
Forgive me if I misunderstood but in one instance you say that you are successfully running an Umbraco instance on EC2 yet on the other you say that is is not very good for running a windows instance. Surely you would need to run a windows instance in order to run IIS for this hosting.
I guess my problem is I don't really want to fork out for the cost of dedicated hosting for a personal portfolio site yet at the same time this is what is required to host an Umbraco site.
It would be more helpful if they were just upfront about their pricing with regards to simple web hosting.
AWS has various size EC2 instances. The ones in the free tier are "micro" instances with very low memory and cpu which is insufficient to, in my experience, run windows. It took fully boot a micro instance when I did try.
We are using Large instance's to run Windows which have superior memory and cpu capacity.
I've been running sites in their shared tier for a while now. You get a Web Application which is basically a reserved set of resource. its costing me 5$ pm per website.
Databases are around 3$ pm per database.
I have had no issues with it and the portal is very useful. You have to do your domain hosting elsewhere but i think thats a small price to pay considering what you get in the portal.
Thanks for the information.
So essentially if I were to convert that to (£) sterling I would be paying about £4 a month for database and hosting. That seems fairly reasonable. If you don't mind me asking, what package and set-up did you go for in order to host your Umbraco site (I am assuming Umbraco 7 here).
Experiences hosting an Umbraco site on Amazon EC2
Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone has any experience with hosting an Umbraco site with Amazon EC2. Their offer seems to good to be true and what I gather from their website is I would be able to run 1 Umbraco website constantly for a whole month (database and all) for free using their AWS free tier.
I notice that in the recommended providers for Umbraco hosting EC2 appears as a recommended cloud host however their website is very confusing as rather than talking about clear pricing they speak in terms of load and usage which I guess is variable really.
I guess my question is would I be able to get away with using their free AWS tier to host a fairly small Umbraco portfolio site for a year or do you think I would start to hit charges etc.
I only ask because Umbraco requires full trust and to get this with most other hosting providers you need to shell out for dedicated hosting which is fine if you are a business but as a personal user it really is just too steep.
Any feedback or experiences with regards to this would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Jason
Firstly, I wouldn't consider the free tier for trying to run an EC2 windows instance. The EC2 Micro instance (which is what is part of the free tier) just isn't powerful enough in my experience to run Windows, let alone a website on it.
However, other than the instance issue, We've been running Umbraco sites on AWS for a while.
Currently our sites just sit on an EC2 instance with a local SQL install, however I am currently looking at using EC2 instances with fail over and the RDS as a more robust set up.
This link AWS Failover Architecture gives some quite good AWS configuration advice in my opinion along with this link: Building a scalable web app on AWS
I would also highly recomend reading an understanding AWS best practice and the rules surrounding instance configuration and EBS set up (EBS is what is used for storage in EC2)
Understanding EC2 Instance Store
Forgive me if I misunderstood but in one instance you say that you are successfully running an Umbraco instance on EC2 yet on the other you say that is is not very good for running a windows instance. Surely you would need to run a windows instance in order to run IIS for this hosting.
I guess my problem is I don't really want to fork out for the cost of dedicated hosting for a personal portfolio site yet at the same time this is what is required to host an Umbraco site.
It would be more helpful if they were just upfront about their pricing with regards to simple web hosting.
AWS has various size EC2 instances. The ones in the free tier are "micro" instances with very low memory and cpu which is insufficient to, in my experience, run windows. It took fully boot a micro instance when I did try.
We are using Large instance's to run Windows which have superior memory and cpu capacity.
Hello,
No real experience with EC2.
But you may want to try Azure.
I've been running sites in their shared tier for a while now. You get a Web Application which is basically a reserved set of resource. its costing me 5$ pm per website.
Databases are around 3$ pm per database.
I have had no issues with it and the portal is very useful. You have to do your domain hosting elsewhere but i think thats a small price to pay considering what you get in the portal.
Cheers,
James
Hi James,
Thanks for the information. So essentially if I were to convert that to (£) sterling I would be paying about £4 a month for database and hosting. That seems fairly reasonable. If you don't mind me asking, what package and set-up did you go for in order to host your Umbraco site (I am assuming Umbraco 7 here).
Cheers,
Jason
Yep, Umbraco 7. My sites are all up to date.
You get a free trial month. But if you go for their "Shared App Plan" that should be more than enough.
None of my editors have had any issues with speed in the back end yet.
It starts to get expensive when you jump to "Basic + Standard + Premium" packages.
Sign up for a free trial, you can have a look around and see what you think.
I would highly recommend though, very intuitive and easy to use.
is working on a reply...