What is an ideal instance size on ec2 servers for a busy site, as in a portal

Question

I want to know the ideal instance site for a portal, may it be a news portal or sports portal and is there a better hosting solution than ec2 for such a site ?

Answer 1

I guess the answer is in the features and in the load that you need for your "portal". "Portal" is such a generic name.

• Which languages do you need to support?
• Which features do you need?
• Do you need terminal access?
• How many users do you expect?
• Do you expect peaks in the visitors (for example at a given time/day)?

From your tags I understand you just need Apache and PHP. Several hosting services are available that support them, in both free and professional versions, with different limitations.

Just Google for "hosting php" and try to find the one that better fits to your needs.

Answer 2

The bandwidth costs for EC2 can get out of hand pretty quickly. So if you're expecting a lot of traffic, you might want to look at dedicated hosting solutions.

If you really want EC2, I would suggest starting off with the smallest instance and then upgrading to a higher capacity instance as required. The best part about EC2 is that you can create an image of your server and when you want to upgrade, you just launch a higher capacity instance of that image. This will minimise your downtime.

Answer 3

In general it is probably best to start with the smallest instance type (m1.small) and then move up as necessary. I think in your case, since you have a PHP app it is probably CPU and database bound, I would test c1.medium instances. The reason I think that size might be a better fit is because you get 5 vcpus versus 1 vcpu with m1.smalls. You basically get 5x the cpu power for only 2x the price (.10c vs .20c/hr). Also in my experience c1.medium performance has been a lot more consistent than m1.smalls.