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How much does it usually cost to host a small Wordpress blog on Amazon?

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closed as off topic by Scott Pack, Jason Berg, Ward, Mark Henderson♦, John Gardeniers Jan 18 '11 at 3:58

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4 Answers

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First off: S3 is only for storing static (unchanging) content like images or text files. Wordpress doesn't fit this setup - it rerenders the page every time you view it, so you really want to be comparing your current MediaTemple setup to Amazon EC2, which lets you rent a computer by the hour.

The smallest instance size is a Micro, which provides 613MB RAM - more than enough to run a small Wordpress installation.

Instances are $0.02/hour, or about $15/month assuming you want your blog to be up and running 24/7. Micro instances come with no disk space and need an EBS volume to have a place to store your data ($0.10/GB/month) and bandwidth is extra, so assume all together somewhere just south of $20/month.

You can get cheaper if you're willing to prepay for a reserved instance - for example, $82 up front lets you pay $0.007/hour for the instance, which over 3 years lowers the instance hour cost to under $10/month. You'd still need disk + bandwith, so the absolute cheapest this way would be about $15/month.

Remember, however, with EC2 all you get is the raw resources. With great power comes great responsibility. There's no hand-holding on getting things running, maintaining security updates, dealing with machine crashes etc. That's probably a large part of what a company like MediaTemple is providing, and by switching to EC2 for a few buck less you'll be losing that.

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Thank you very much.:) – Dar4 Jan 15 '11 at 4:18
+1 for an accurate depiction... however... a sly admin could host his WordPress instance locally for editing and such, then use S3 as a reverse proxy (assuming comments and interactive features are disabled or forwarded to the working WordPress instance) – danlefree Jan 15 '11 at 4:24
@danlefree: You're absolutely right. I'd consider doing it just for the challenge, but honestly if you're going the static-files-on-S3 route there are much better tools than Wordpress. :-) – natacado Jan 15 '11 at 4:59
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up vote 3 down vote

4sysops has a series of posts on Amazon hosting for the blog he runs. Worth reading through them. Goes over the positives, and negatives, as well as costs.

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up vote 0 down vote

A AWS micro instance (the smallest they have) is sufficient for your blog.

$0.085 per hour => $62/month

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A blog with 50 subs for 62 dollars a month? Wow... that's much too expensive by far, from where I'm sitting. – Jürgen A. Erhard Jan 15 '11 at 0:38
This is incorrect. Micro instances are only $0.02/hour. The $0.085/hour is for a small instance, which has 1.7GB RAM, per-instance ephemeral disk space, and more dedicate access to the CPU, albeit less burstability. – natacado Jan 15 '11 at 2:53
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up vote 0 down vote

They also have a free offering for one year: http://aws.amazon.com/free/

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Can Amazon S3 be used for hosting PHP scripts or not? – Dar4 Jan 15 '11 at 1:33
Yes, you can use either Windows or Linux and both support PHP – BenGC Jan 15 '11 at 4:10
Wait, S3? Not EC2? – Dar4 Jan 15 '11 at 4:19
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You can host scripts on S3, as in you can store the files there and download them (the scripts, not the web pages you want them to generate), but you can't execute them, as S3 is purely a storage service and offers no way to execute code. – Mike Scott Jan 15 '11 at 7:50
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