Sunday, August 27, 2017

Amazon Web Services

Websites: This week, I've been on vacation, but as a diversion, I've known my hosting subscription for my website is up for renewal and I'd wanted to move the site to AWS, Amazon's Web Services technology, anyway. So perhaps over an hour, spread among perhaps 5 separate settings, I accomplished this move.

What I needed to utilize to accomplish this was the following

  • A better backup mechanism: I'm using Wordpress for my site, and there are a number of backup solutions there, the one I was using was easy to create a backup image of the site content and the database, and store it in a set of files on my Dropbox presence (I wanted a separate store for it) but I had never tried to restore the website from any of these backups. After examining other tools, I finally settled on All-in-One Migration by https://servmask.com/ ; they are also in the plugins library. 


  • Creating an EC2 instance with a marketplace app for Wordpress via Bitnami was straightforward except for the simple instructions I followed on the AWS community noted to ignore the creation of server keypairs (for SSH access). Attempted to create the keypairs later was never successful and I am not really sure why, reinstantiating the instance and reloading my website content but this time creating the keypairs during that instantiation was successful. 


AWS has a free tier (for an initial one year) so if you've never done this before, you should try it. The market place has a number of apps already available for low or no software cost.