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TerrePorter's avatar

Cloud Hosting

Hey All, I was looking at using Forge but after reading about it I see it requires a cloud server. I have not been keeping up with cloud hosting as I have a server in a data center and did need the cloud. The server is has 4 core, 16GB with 500GB of drive space. However, I am looking at Cloud hosting but I am have a difficult time comparing the cost to my existing web server.

I have a site that uses about 120GB of bandwidth a month, and currently has about 100GB of data (MySQL Database and content). I think I could reduce the file storage some. I have looked at AWS, Digital Ocean, Linode, and a few others.

How do I compare the cost of a managed server to a cloud server? Do you use one cloud server per website? Can anyone enlighten me with web sites or information?

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martinbean's avatar
Level 80

@TerrePorter Unfortunately there’s no one-to-one comparison of costs of a VPS and a ‘cloud’ provider, because cloud requires you to set up your own machines, and then different providers have different costs and whatnot.

With something like AWS, you would set up a virtual computer (EC2 instance) to be your web server, and then use something like RDS for your database server. You don’t really store files to a file system, and instead are supposed to use something like S3 to store things like uploads (although your application code resides on the EC2 instance). Then if you have a service with heavy usage, you might need to set up a load balancer with multiple EC2 instances behind it.

While you may be able to save money moving to a cloud set-up, it’s not something you should consider lightly without being confident. There’s a lot more involved in setting up cloud services, and you also become a lot more responsible for things. For example, if you lose data, you’re not going to be able to call a support centre and get a back-up. If you don’t have back-ups in place, you’ve lost the data and there’s nothing you can do about that. And if you’ve misconfigured things, then there’s the potential to incur lots of cost.

I’d say if your current hosting set-up is working for you then stick with it, because there’s a lot to cloud hosting, and things can go wrong very quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing. Only switch to cloud-based services when you’re confident about your needs, the set-up, and estimated costs. AWS does provide a cost calculator to put figures into: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

TerrePorter's avatar

@martinbean Thanks for the information. I will likely see if I can setup a local cloud and “emulate” the process so that I can see how the coding deferrers and how all of the cloud parts tie together. My world is in flux right now and cloud hosting appears to be something that developers are expected to understand as I am seeing quite a few “experience with AWS” notes on job postings.

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