The back-story
I’ve had a shared hosting plan with HostGator since 2004. It’s the $14.95 p/m Business Plan and when I first starting hosting client sites, my needs were small. Back then, I only had a few WordPress sites and never had a problem with HostGator’s service or support. In-fact, I still highly recommend HostGator (affiliate link) for any Webmaster just getting their feet wet.
But, with all the Tutorials, Hacks, and in-coming links my site gets excellent traffic. Plus I host almost a dozen radio station websites. themselves are super CPU/Bandwidth intensive with thousands upon thousands of visitors a day. What happens when WXYZ-FM runs a web-only contest? Bottlenecks galore. Ugh.
Looking for more horsepower
In 2010, Google announced that page speed would directly affect search engine rankings. Putting pressure on designers, developers and webmasters to optimize their websites by cutting the fat (bloated code and graphics) and pay closer attention to their web hosting.
On the chart below, you can see where bottlenecks are. I needed to find a more power hosting option.
If you look at mid-February, you'll see the dramatic drop after switching to Amazon AWS.
I shopped around, and even tried VPS-NET. They’re very popular and blogger friendly, but still I wasn’t satisfied. That led me to Amazon Web Services (Amazon AWS).
Amazon to the rescue!
I’m very comfortable with Linux command-line and love the support/community behind the Ubuntu project. I chose to go with a Large Instance of the ZAMP AMI.
Setup was easy thanks to a helpful YouTube video provided by the creator of the ZAMP AMI, Mathan Kumar.
Before lunch, gregrickaby.com (and my radio station websites) were equipped with: Ubuntu 10.10 x64, WebMin, S3, and Amazon’s new CDN, CloudFront.
The proof
Cloud vs. Shared
Test site: gregrickaby.com
Host: Amazon AWS
CMS: WordPress/Thesis
Caching: Off
Total Size: 319.1KB
Total Load Time: 3.7 seconds
Proof: Pingdom speed test
Test Site: amandacom.com
Host: HostGator – Business Shared
CMS: WordPress/Thesis
Caching: Off
Total Size: 300.7KB
Total Load Time: 14.3 seconds
Proof: Pingdom speed test
As you can see, gregrickaby.com had 6.19% more data to serve – and it was served 286.486% faster!
Load Test
Even with 50 simultaneous users, performance didn’t take a hit.
http://loadimpact.com/result/gregrickaby.com-f15c3cd4df9b7b587885ed6ef3a5f304
Pricing
Amazon has both the monthly option and pay-as-you-go. Choosing one is up to you, I’m using pay-as-you-go. A Large Instance costs $0.34 per hour. Totaling is easy: 744 hours in a month, multiplied by $0.34 = $252.96
$252.95 gets me a Quad-Core Xeon, 850GB of storage, 7.5GB of RAM, and zero bottlenecks.
Expensive? Yes, but my radio station clients require performance and plenty of disk space for streaming and podcasting.
Final thoughts
Amazon AWS isn’t for the faint of heart, and certainly isn’t for everyone. If you’re comfortable with the command-line and demand a server that can handle the “digg-effect”, then AWS is for you.
More affordable options
Since writing this post, Hostgator has launched it’s cloud based VPS service which starts at $15.96 p/m while using the coupon code: HGVPS
Hey, great post. I am slowly getting into this cloud thing and I am looking to move some of my sites onto the cloud. I read about this new provider called SiteCloud. What attracts me to them versus the other cloud hosting providers is the fact that it’s relatively cheap and it also has everything configured for me… I don’t have to worry about upgrading, scaling up, configuring load balancers and stuff. This one has cPanel too. The only other one I can think of is Mosso, but they are way too expensive and don’t have cPanel.
I am thinking of trying them…
Thanks for the great article , i’ve done a research on cloud computing last year for college and i see cloud hosting is the solution for all the web problems now and also the cloud computing concept is the solution for many many IT problems around the world ..
Hi Greg, after reading your post I played around with the Pingdom Tools and surprisingly most of my Shared Hosting websites with comparable “file” size (around 200-300kb frontpages) load as fast as yours does.
All my websites/blogs are created with Thesis 1.5.1 (1.6 and 1.7 are also in the game sometimes) and I am asking myself right now if and how I would benefit from Cloud Hosting at all!?
I’m going to go through some more test though as I believe it also has to do with the daytime I try to access websites…
I do also believe that my websites are loading fast enough because they are mostly pretty small ones :-)
Conclusio: Interesting post with some futuristic (yet-to-come-to-a-broader-audience) ideas. Cloud Computing is for sure going to be the winner in a few years!
While CDN are completely understandable for large sites, the cost of Cloud versus a quality host is questionable at best. While I haven’t personally used Hostgator the reality is your dedicated hosting provider should be able to scale to your needs… The catch is simple, “Dedicated” host versus “Shared” host, that is the biggest difference! Many people don’t realize that most $19.95 monthly for A,B,C hosting is shared or virtual dedicated (which is shared) with hundreds of other sites, thus the server/network gets slow during spikes. The reality is that even a cloud host can get slowed down if they don’t have a well connected or proper network. Something you need to ask a Cloud host is how many server and where are they located? Ten servers around the world isn’t on par with Amazon who has a couple of thousand servers, located all over the world. The fear that I see is hosting companies offering “cloud hosting” based on the fact that they have one server in New York and one in LA. and then charge a hourly, processing or data fee which is going to MUCH more then simply having a Dedicated server connected to a backbone, which will scale to most sites.
If your server is being slow and it’s not a network issue (have you properly tested for that?), then you need to look at your app running and figure out what is causing all of the processing power to be used. Quality programming makes a HUGE difference, period. If it’s not a processor issue, it might simply be a network setting, check check check. Remember, unless you are serving 50-100,000 UNIQUE users per day, your server can handle it! Serving Video/Audio then do it properly and stream it with a replicating (repeater) server to take the load off your main server. Akamai has third parties that piggy back on their network who only serve Video/Audio at a VERY affordable cost.
As for the test above, sorry but you can’t compare A with B, are they the exact same programs line for line? What about type of traffic; site A is text and site B Audio? How many sites are hosted on your server at Hostgator, how many on your VPN cloud servers? To many variables to provide a graphic as if it was scientific, sorry but this is going to get those hosting company offering cloud simply to get more money.
Just my input,
Charles
Love it Charles! You’re comment is a great reminder to always do your research no matter what type of hosting you are looking for. Make sure the provider and their services jive with your needs.
The A to B test above is two WordPress sites running the Thesis theme with very similar customized code. I did try and find two very comparable sites to compare on the different hosts.
As I said, I’m a fan of Hostgator too! No problems with them at all.