At first, it seemed to be an easy ride, get the Amazon AWS Free Tier to connect with my domain, setup the DNS server to the Web Server, install any freeware CMS or perhaps build/compile some open source basic website management, publish whatever I want to my domain, profit!
I even have a custom ASP.NET Razor website project that could be changed without much effort to fit the DFX.LV minimal need.
But I choosed the longest and hardest road:
- AWS EC2 have 30GB Free but 20GB are ocuppied by Windows Server, so I needed to setup one Amazon S3 with 5GB free space to host part of the web files.
- AWS RDS MySQL Database have 20GB of database space for free, it wasn’t hard to get it ready but some few mistakes forced me to redo all the work, it took a lot more hours than expected.
- PHP 7.0 on AWS Windows Server, it works but it took a lot more hours than expected.
- WordPress on ISS10 with AWS RDS Database, it works but it took a lot more hours than expected.
- WordPress with lots of plugins on a single 2.4Ghz CPU and 200MB from 1GB of RAM Memory? It works but I’m not sure how long it will hold…
Lessons learned:
- Always expect to invest more hours than the task difficulty suggests.
- Always setup a Database Name on AWS RDS Create Database Wizards, without it the WordPress fails with message “Login works but can’t connect database”.
