Looking for advice forge and providers

But I was a bit concerned that all the videos have been archived. Is this still used as a good tool? Hoping it is.

The older ones were archived, because they recently made a new series/redid the old ones 4 months ago: https://laracasts.com/series/learn-laravel-forge

I was looking at AWS, but after going to their site. There is just too many options and not sure what I need for forge.

You will probably have that problem with other providers. See next point.

As for what I have been building is a replacement for my business site and licence server. Between 70-120 hits per min.

That's a bit more helpful, but it would be more helpful to know the actual stats of your current server (how many cpus/type of cpu, how much ram, how much ssd space, etc). Once you determine what hardware your current setup is using, you can look for similar hardware in a cloud server and be comparing apples to apples (or closer anyway).

Also it would be good to know how much of your current server is actually utilized by your app. Like if you have x cpu/ram, but it's running at 70% resource utilization, you'd probably want more cpu than you currently have, etc).

Great looking forward to the new videos.

As for servers and resources. The are low end 4 cores 8 gig of ram in three locations.

Web server is low traffic. 2 Licence servers with just a database each, and our c++ hits a php page via a encryption php lib to get licence and user login. After they login, it fills a change table that a cron task runs every min to sync all 3 users table on all three servers. Looking at the change tables 70-120 changes per min. This is using 65% resources.

From what I’m reading AWS is a zero down solution and might be able to go to one login server and use the main site as backup.

Thanks for input

Just creating an EC2 instance on AWS does not give you a zero downtime setup.

To do that, you'd need to setup your app on Elastic Beanstalk. This would side step Forge.

To get this using Laravel services you could setup your server on AWS, Digital Ocean etc. Then setup an Envoyrer account via https://envoyer.io/. The latter is paid. You can use Laravel's down free alternative Envoy https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/envoy - there are various Envoy scripts out there that do exactly what Envoyer does.