Many people like to host their website on a cloud service, but they don’t want to spend the money. Luckily for you, there’s Amazon Web Services that is free up until your site hits one million annual visits. This blog post will show you how hosting your WordPress site on AWS can be done quickly and cheaply.
If this blog post interests you, then keep reading.
Amazon Web Services account (AWS)
You need to have an Amazon Web Services account (AWS).
Make sure that you select the ‘free usage tier’ during signup. It’s completely free until you hit one million annual visits. They won’t bill you until you use more than USD 1 for their services.
Create a WordPress Site on AWS Elastic Beanstalk
The easiest way to host your website on AWS is by using Elastic Beanstalk. It takes care of all the technical stuff so you can focus on building out your site. Go ahead and sign in with your account.
Once signed in, you’ll see the dashboard:
- Create a ‘Web Server.’ Go ahead and click on “Get Started Now” under Web Servers. You’ll be presented with all of the different frameworks you can use on Elastic Beanstalk’s platform. Since we’re using WordPress, pick it from the list of options.
- It will take you to the environment configuration page, where you’ll need to hit “Configuration 1”.
- Click on it, and you’ll be presented with a form that asks for general information about your WordPress website, in particular the ‘Application Name’, which is essentially the domain name of your site.
- The next page is where we need to enter database-connection information. Pick a database engine, choose MySQL, but you can also use MariaDB if you want.
- Ensure that your RDS Root Password has at least eight characters in it, and then write down the ‘Endpoint URL’ for future reference.
- On the next page, we need to allocate some instance capacity and some application capacity.
Instance capacity is essentially the amount of power your site gets, while application capacity is like a ‘budget’ that Elastic Beanstalk will use to ensure your site stays up even if you’ve hit your allocated budget (that’s why we gave that the name ‘budget’).
These values are relative to each other. For example, if you entered a value of 1, for instance, capacity and 100 for application capacity, then Elastic Beanstalk will ensure it never uses more than one web server. If your site only gets a few hundred visitors a day, you should allocate a high application capacity.
The next page is where we set up our load balancer, distributing the requests coming into your WordPress website across your Elastic Beanstalk instances.
Finally, the last thing we need to do is create our WordPress site. Click on ‘Create Web Server,’ and Elastic Beanstalk will provision all of the resources necessary for your website. Once everything is created, it’ll take you to what Elastic Beanstalk has made for you.
That’s it! Elastic Beanstalk configured your new website for you and automatically launched an EC2 instance inside AWS for your site to live on.
