AWS speed issue - performance

We are facing speed issue on our CRM based website, hosted on AWS EC2 with m3.medium instance.
On this AMI, we have installed IIS 7.0 and MS SQL server(for local database).
And our region is US-West-2 (Oregon).
The site is functioning properly but speed is slow as compared to other hosting provider(Same site is hosted with BigRock with different domain).
There is noticeable speed difference between both website(BigRock and AWS) with same code but different domain.
Can someone please suggest what should we do to increase the speed of our site?

Since you have hosted your CRM based website in us-west-2, there will be latency issue which is obvious. If you are planning to serve Indian customers I suggest to host it in the ap-southeast-1 region. Also I guess bigrock data-centers are located in India itself. That's the reason latency will be less. Also considering integrating cloud-front or any CDN if you really want to accelerate the website. Since it's a CRM website you have a look at Elastic Memcache also.

Related

Free images hosting with CDN

I am looking for free solution to image hosting with CDN. I got website on small paid hosting and there will be lot of image galleries which I would like to upload to some cloud like Google Drive and use cloud's CDN to link images on my web. Any recommendations for free solution ?
CDN and cloud storage like Google Drive are two different things.
A CDN can be defined as:
A content delivery network or content distribution network is a
geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data
centers. The goal is to provide high availability and high performance
by distributing the service spatially relative to end-users.
Where as cloud storage services provides highly available and secure storage space over the cloud. Here is a link which explains the difference of these two in terms of AWS(CloudFront vs S3).
If your website traffic is moderate and you want to use free CDN, then you may signup for AWS free tier. The free tier gives you 50 GB Data Transfer Out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests for Amazon CloudFront(AWS CDN) each month for one year. Here's a tutorial for getting started with AWS CloudFront
If you intended to use cloud storage services then also the free AWS tier provides you with 5 GB of space in AWS S3 for 1 year.
Apart from AWS free tier you may also like to checkout free Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. Levering these free tier resources it's even possible to host your current website on these platforms almost for free given the usage is within free tier limits.

any alternatives to Amazon Windows Virtual Machine hosting?

Does anyone know if there are any competing hosting alternatives I can explore other than Amazon Web Services for running very small instances of Windows virtual machines? I have used AWS for years but am thinking that it might be worth-while to see if there are better alternatives.
In particular, the scenario I have is this: I have created a Windows virtual machine image with the applications and configuration I want and then spin up VMs based on that image as I need from on the AWS spot market. I can go weeks at a time without needing any virtual machines but then will spin up 20 VMs for a few hours to do a particular job. I typically pay around .61 cents an hour per micro Windows VM running on AWS (keep in mind that the AWS spot market is way cheaper than reserved instances).
Does Microsoft Azure or any other service support a similar scenario? I don't mind paying a little more if the performance and such is better. However, it is absolutely critical that I can set things up so I only have to pay for VMs when I actually need them rather than keep paying for VMs that aren't in use.
Microsoft Azure has the capability you are looking for. You can upload your own images and then quickly deploy extra-small machines based on it. On Azure you can turf off the VM's through the Azure portal after you are finished with them and you will not be charged. Make sure that you do it through the portal and not the windows session or you will continue to be billed.
Check out this link for pricing information:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/
You can follow these steps to upload your image to your azure account:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-create-upload-vhd-windows-server/
Also, you can scale up very easy in the azure portal so this might help reduce your need for spinning up multiple machines.

Cheapest, future-scalable way to host a HTTPS PHP Website on AWS?

I've already got an RDS instance configured and running, but currently we're still running on our old web host. We'd like to decrease latency by hosting the code within AWS.
Two concerns:
1) Future scalability
2) Redundancy ... not a huge concern but AWS does occasionally go down.
Has anyone had this problem where they just need to cheaply run what is essentially a database interface via a language such as PHP/Ruby, in 2 regions? (with one as a failover)
Does Amazon offer something that automatically manages resources, that's also cost effective?
Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk service supports both PHP and Ruby apps natively, and allows you to scale your app servers automatically.
In a second region, run a slave RDS instance off of your master (easy to set up in RDS) and have another beanstalk setup there ready as a failover.

Dedicated Servers versus Amazon EC2

What are the pros and cons of using dedicated servers versus Aamzon EC2 for hosting a high traffic website - that has about 2 million visitors and 5 million page views a month. The content is mostly dynamic and served from a database. Does anyone has any experience of the costs and performance for such a setup.
Amazon EC2 is going to be much more cost-effective versus dedicated servers from my experience. Should you experience a sudden rise in the volume of traffic to your site all you need to do is shell out some extra $$ to Amazon and voila your site can handle the traffic (assuming there are no coding bottlenecks). Unless you have a truly massive website (ie: Facebook) the benefits of hosting on Amazon EC2 far outweigh the risks.
One of the only risks that you take with hosting on EC2 was showcased a few months ago when the whole cloud went down, taking Foursquare, Quorra, Reddit, and other multi-million user base sites down along with it.
From a user experience I believe interaction with the cloud hosting provider is pretty much the same as interacting with a dedicated server, so the only real concern to take into account would be cost-effectiveness.
My own experience tells me that at least in this part of the world, New Zealand, where we don't yet have a local amazon server farm, Amazon provides poor performance and is one of the most expensive options for hosting busy websites. I placed some background on my blog that goes through my own experiences. http://www.printnet.co.nz/category/hosting/

Amazon AMI selection

I just found out about amazon EC2. I am wondering what it actually offers. I use to go with VPS servers and now I want to learn if EC2 give me the same options as a VPS with some host company.
Are there any limitations on what I can install?
Thanks
Cristian
Probably the main difference between EC2 and a conventional VPS hosting service is the pricing model. EC2 charges for CPU time (and other resources) by the hour, whereas many conventional services charge by the month (or greater). The best way to learn about EC2 would be to jump into the documentation, and then sign up for the free usage tier.
Within reason, there are no limitations on what you can install.

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