WordPress on AWS

Introduction

I had been running my WordPress blog on a shared hosting account at a shared hosting provider for a while now, when about a month ago I decided to consider alternative solutions. In particular, I wanted to see if I can lower the cost of running my site. Here was my starting point:

Web Hosting from shared hosting $72 / year (paid in 2-year increments)
Domain Registration $11 / year
SSL Certificate (promotion) $2 / year

Given that my blog gets very low traffic, I decided to give AWS a shot. With microbilling, I thought I should be able to drive the cost of my hosting even further down from the already low $6/month currently (for comparison, a blog hosted on wordpress.com costs $8.25/month, billed yearly, and that does not even include google analytics integration, which I can easily add for free to my self-hosted wordpress site).

TL;DR; I was wrong. Hosting on AWS is more expensive with a lower level of reliability, scalability and higher management overhead.

Just the cost of running the t2.micro VM instance is $9.36/month, and that does not include the cost of the RDS instance and the ELB.

I will share the details of my experience in a later post.

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