Best Practices When Hosting On AWS

Intro

Hosting your website on AWS is one of the best decisions you can make for your business. Not only is it scalable and reliable, but you also get the added benefit of security and compliance.

However, when hosting your site, you don't just want to "set it and forget it." There are certain best practices you should follow in order to get the most out of your AWS hosting experience.

In this post, we'll cover some of the best practices you should follow when hosting your website on AWS. By following these tips, you'll be able to ensure that your website is running smoothly and efficiently, while also keeping your costs down.

Use The Right Instance Type

An Instance type is a set of specifications for your virtual server. It includes the CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your server.

There are a number of different instance types available on the AWS platform. They include general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and storage-optimized instances.

When choosing an instance type for your website, you'll need to do a web audit and determine what kind of workload your site will have. If your site will be a simple WordPress blog, for example, you won't need as much power as a site that's running a complex e-commerce platform.

You'll also want to consider how much traffic your site is likely to get. If you're expecting a lot of traffic, you'll need an instance type that can handle the load.

If you're not sure which instance type is right for your website, Amazon has a handy tool that can help you choose.

Use Auto Scaling To Save Money

Auto-scaling is a feature of AWS that allows you to automatically scale your website up or down, based on traffic levels.

For example, let's say you have a WordPress site that gets a lot of traffic during the day, but very little traffic at night. With auto-scaling, you can set your site to scale down at night, when traffic is low. This saves you money on your AWS hosting bill, as you're only paying for the resources you need.

Auto-scaling is a great way to save money on your AWS hosting costs. It's also a good way to ensure that your website is always running at peak performance, as you're able to scale up when traffic levels increase.

Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that deliver content to users based on their location.

For example, let's say your website is hosted in the US, but you have visitors from all over the world. A CDN can help to speed up the delivery of your content to those visitors, as they'll be routed to a server that's closer to their location. Speed is one of the 200 Google ranking factors.

Amazon uses CloudFront, a CDN service, to deliver content from its servers to users around the world. Even though this feature is readily available, it is not automatic. You need to set up your Amazon S³ account and CloudFront distributions to take advantage of this feature.

Once you've set up your CDN, you'll want to make sure that all of your static content (images, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc.) is being served from the CDN. This will help to ensure that your site is loading quickly for all users, no matter where they are in the world.

Use Amazon Route 53 For DNS

Managing WordPress on AWS requires a basic understanding of DNS (domain name system). DNS is a system that converts human-readable domain names (like example.com) into IP addresses (like 192.168.0.0).

When you're setting up your website on AWS, you'll need to configure DNS with Amazon Route 53. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable DNS service that's designed to give you low latency and high availability.

Once you've set up Amazon Route 53, you'll need to create a record set. A record set is a collection of records that contains the information necessary to route traffic for your domain.

For each record set, you'll need to specify a name, type, TTL (time to live), and value. The name is the domain or subdomain that you want to route traffic for. The type is the record type (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, or TXT).

The TTL is the time in seconds that you want the record to remain in the DNS cache. The value is the IP address or domain name that you want to route traffic to.

Once you've created your record set, you'll need to create a hosted zone. A hosted zone is a collection of DNS records for a specific domain.

You'll need to specify the name of the domain, and the Amazon Route 53 will automatically generate the nameservers for the zone.

Once you've created your hosted zone, you'll need to configure your domain's DNS settings to use the Amazon Route 53 nameservers.

You can do this by going to your domain registrar's website and updating the DNS settings for your domain.

Use Amazon CloudWatch To Monitor Your Website

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that you can use to monitor your website on AWS.

With Amazon CloudWatch, you can set alarms that will notify you when your website's performance falls below a certain threshold.

You can also use those services to create graphs and charts of your website's performance over time.

Amazon CloudWatch is a great way to keep an eye on your website's performance, and it can help you to identify and resolve issues quickly.

Use Amazon SES To Send Emails

Emails are an important part of any website. You might use email to send notifications to your users or to contact forms from your website.

If you're using AWS to host your website, then you can use Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) to send and receive emails.

Amazon SES is a highly scalable and reliable email service that's designed for businesses of all sizes. Additionally, it's very affordable, and you can pay as you go.

To use Amazon SES, you'll need to set up an account and verify your email address. Once you've done that, you can start sending emails using its API.

Take Advantage of Firewalls

A firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing traffic based on predetermined security rules.

AWS provides two main firewall services: Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall).

Amazon VPC is a service that allows you to create isolated networks within the AWS cloud. With Amazon VPC, you can define custom security rules that will allow only certain types of traffic to reach your website.

AWS WAF is a service that allows you to create web application firewalls. A web application firewall is a type of firewall that specifically filters traffic going to and from a web application.

With this service, you can create rules that will filter traffic based on things like IP addresses, URLs, and the contents of the request. This will scare off hackers and ensure your site is safe from attacks.

There are of course various other practices for securing AWS services you need to follow to account for all of the threats and points of vulnerability which could otherwise be exploited, so don’t stop at the point of rolling out firewalls. In an era of multifaceted cyber threats, we need multifaceted defensive measures to keep hosted solutions consistently safe and secure.

Consider Multiple Data Centers

When you're hosting your website on AWS, you can choose to have your website hosted in multiple data centers. Integrating AWS SaaS solutions into your AWS hosting strategy can further optimize cost-efficiency and scalability, providing a streamlined approach to managing software applications in the cloud.

This is a great way to improve availability and performance, as well as to protect against data loss. When you host your website in multiple data centers, each data center will contain a copy of your website.

If one data center goes down, your website will still be available from the other data centers. Additionally, having your website in multiple data centers can help to improve performance because users will be routed to the closest data center.

Amazon VPC as a Regional service is a great way to deploy multiple instances of your website in different regions. It allows you to create isolated networks which can span multiple Availability Zones.

If you're looking for a more global solution, you can use Amazon Route 53's Latency-Based Routing. This allows you to route users to the nearest instance of your website, regardless of region.

Treat Hosts As Ephemeral And Dynamic

The biggest mistake that you can make when hosting your website on AWS is to treat hosts as static and immutable.

In the cloud, instances can come and go at any time. This means that you need to design your website in a way that can handle hosts being created and destroyed on a regular basis.

Don't make assumptions about the number or location of hosts. Instead, design your website to be able to dynamically adjust to changes in the environment.

A good way to do this is to use Amazon's Auto Scaling service. With Auto Scaling, you can set up rules that will automatically add or remove instances based on conditions that you define.

Final Thoughts

There are many things to consider when you're hosting your website on AWS. By following the best practices that we've discussed in this article, you can be sure that your website will be available, scalable, and secure.

Ensure you complement these practices with quality and valuable content, so your website can rank higher on search engines and attract more visitors.