1

One of my clients wants a small business site run on Wordpress. I'm setting it up through Amazon EC2, and was curious if using Amazon's RDS service to run the wordpress installation is overkill. I could just install MySQL locally on the instance and run it that way.

The site is to have blog posts as well as business "pages". Blog posts wouldn't be generated at more than a handful per week. We don't expect readership to hit hundreds of thousands/month, but it would nice if using RDS did help by responding to peak traffic times.

Would it be better to use RDS in this case? If not, what is the rule-of-thumb usage/requirements threshold one needs to surpass before considering using RDS?

1 Answer 1

2

RDS is not auto-scaling in any way. It is a managed MySQL instance. In order to scale RDS, you need to jump instance sizes or add read slaves, either of which are possible, but both would require manual intervention and likely a bit of downtime.

That said, RDS does offer benefits if you don't care to be a DBA - they can handle backups, MySQL version upgrades, etc. If you expect to need to scale up past a single web server, than it would make sense to use RDS now, if not in the future.

You really just need to examine the sysadmin and dba skills available and the time you're willing to devote to maintenance and then decide whether the extra cost for RDS is worth it for your business.

1
  • 1
    I have done some minor DBA, so it seems like for a small blogging DB, RDS may not be worth the cost. If the site ever hits that threshold of needing a more advanced DB solution, perhaps that's when it's time to migrate to RDS (which I hear is a piece of cake).
    – tralston
    Jul 29, 2014 at 7:12

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .