It is rightly said that AWS (Amazon Web Services) has radically changed the economics of running a web technology based company. With AWS, Amazon has an awesome product for hosting your online social community.
Let us help you in installing SocialEngine on your AWS instance and get your community rolling.
Note: Amazon is currently offering a 1 Year - Free Usage Tier for hosting. To sign up for this amazing offer, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .
Note: For both the cases of a Fresh Setup or for Migrating your SocialEngine community from your current hosting to Amazon AWS Cloud hosting, you may order this service.
It is rightly said that AWS (Amazon Web Services) has radically changed the economics of running a web technology based company. With AWS, Amazon provides awesome products for hosting your online social community.
You can rent a server on AWS and run it just as you would a physical server. With pay-as-you-go pricing, you pay for your virtual server only while it runs. You start paying for servers by the hour. You only pay for the boxes when they run, and you only pay for storage that’s actually in use, so your startup costs are minimal, and it encourages experimentation at the hardware level, to see what configuration works best for your website.
The biggest difference and advantage of using AWS is flexibility. Backed by the AWS network, your virtual server can do things no physical server can, such as automatically scaling into multiple servers when demand for your application increases. A new box can be spun up very, very quickly. This allows for scaling up in response to load events, rather than in advance of them: when your monitoring detects high load, you can spin up additional capacity, and it can be ready in time to handle the current load event. You can again scale down when the load decreases, and you would pay only for what you use.
There are many more advantages of using AWS for hosting your social network like Elastic load balancing, Amazon Cloudfront (CDN), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon ElastiCache, Security, etc (See our service: Speeding up your SocialEngine Website).
Pricings:
See the "AWS Pricing" tab above.
Details Required for Service:
We will be needing the following information and files from you to proceed with setup and installation. Please send these to us via a Support Ticket from your SocialApps.tech Client Area after purchasing this service:
1) Your SocialEngine License key
2) AWS Account Login (You just need to do basic signup for AWS from here: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ and give us your account details. We will do the other AWS configurations for you.):
- Email
- Password
3) Your site URL
4) Domain registration account information (for domain mapping).
5) Other desired site information:
- Community Title
- Admin Email
- Admin Password
This service is normally completed in 12 to 48 hours.
SocialApps.tech's installation and setup service for AWS enables you to have a high performance server setup for your SocialEngine website. It includes:
• Setting up your Amazon EC2 instance according to SocialEngine system requirements (http://support.socialengine.com/questions/152/SocialEngine-Requirements).
• Installing SocialEngine PHP on Amazon EC2 (or migrating your current website to Amazon EC2 as the case may be).
• Domain mapping: Mapping your website's domain to your Amazon EC2 instance.
• If your website is hosted on a Dedicated Server, we will move it to Amazon S3 which is an object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It is designed to deliver durability and provides flexibility.
• If your website is running on Amazon Web Services (AWS): In this case, in addition to the above mentioned setups for dedicated server hosting, you can have Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
• You may ask us to do some or all of the above in this service.
AWS has a pay-as-you-go pricing which means that you only pay for the resources used by your website. To check the pricings of Amazon EC2 for hosting, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (Amazon is currently offering a 1 Year - Free Usage Tier for hosting. To sign up for this amazing offer, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ ) .
For all AWS Services, you can calculate what your Monthly / Weekly / Daily costs would be, by using this Simple Calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html. You will be glad to know how economical these powerful services will be for you.
You can save a lot by choosing Reserved Instances (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/), wherein you reserve your AWS instance for a long term duration (1 year, 3 years, etc) by paying a fixed one-time fee and a very low monthly fee. To know your saving, you can select the desired reserved instance in "Billing Option" while using the above mentioned calculator.
The best way to understand AWS pricing is to go through the "How AWS Pricing Works" Whitepaper (http://bit.ly/aws-pricing). Though reading this will take a little time, you would be glad you did it.
The below table shows approximate Monthly Cost of some instance types of Amazon EC2 for hosting derived using the simple calculator:
| Service | Instance Type | Configuration | On-Demand | Partial Upfront | 1 Year Partial Upfront Reserved | 3 Year Partial Upfront Reserved |
| Amazon EC2 | t2.medium Recommended |
2 Virtual Core, 4 GB RAM | $38 Monthly | $10 Monthly | $120 (One-Time) + $10 (Monthly) = $240 (For 1 Year) | $120 (One-Time) + $10 (36 Months) = $480 (For 3 Years) |
| t2.micro | 1 Virtual Core, 1 GB RAM | $9.50 Monthly | $2.48 Monthly | $30 (One-Time) + $2.48 (Monthly) = $59.76 (For 1 Year) | $30 (One-Time) + $2.48 (36 Months) = $119.28 (For 3 Years) | |
| C4.large | 2 Virtual Core, 3.75 GB RAM | $75.60 Monthly | $21.90 Monthly | $263 (One-Time) + $21.90 (Monthly) = $525.80 (For 1 Year) | $263 (One-Time) + $21.90 (36 Months) = $1051.40 (For 3 Years) |
To check the monthly costs of other instance types, please use the calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html.
| Service | Cost |
| Amazon S3 + CloudFront | About $3 per-month for 1 to 20 GB storage and data transfer |
| Amazon RDS | About $16.5 per-month for a db.t2.small instance type of 20 GB storage with 1 year Heavy Utilization Reserved |
We recommend that after about a month of setting up your website on AWS (by then you would get an idea of the resources your community needs), you should make your instances "Reserved" to save costs.
Amazon had recently announced price reductions for various AWS services (including EC2, RDS, S3 and CloudFront) which will provide you big savings. To see complete details, please visit: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/aws-price-reduction-42-ec2-s3-rds-elasticache-and-elastic-mapreduce.html.
The new reduced prices for AWS are now effective starting from April 1, 2014. To calculate the cost estimates for hosting your website on AWS, you can use this easy calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html.
For medium-sized communities, we would suggest the below AWS services to be used, with their respective cost estimates:
Amazon EC2:- Configuration: Linux on t2.medium + 1 Year Partial Upfront Reserved
Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of USD 240
Amazon RDS:-
Configuration: db.t2.small + 1 Year Heavy Utilization Reserved
Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of USD 102 + Monthly Payment of USD 8
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: USD 198
Amazon S3 Storage + Cloud Front
Cost Estimates Break-up: USD 3 Monthly
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: USD 36
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Hence, Total Yearly Cost Estimate of above services = USD 240 + USD 198 + USD 36 = USD 474 (USD 39.5 monthly)
The above cost estimate is for our recommended hosting configuration on Amazon AWS for a medium-sized community. As your community grows, the flexibility of AWS enables you to re-size your configurations.
For the above cost estimates, we have considered 1 year reserved instances. After you become comfortable with your AWS hosting configurations, you can save further by going for 3 years reserved instances. For above configurations, the cost estimates for 3 years Partial Upfront Instances of EC2 + RDS + S3 + CloudFront are: USD 978 (USD 480 + USD 390 + USD 108)
Total Effective Yearly Cost Estimate of above services for 3 years Partial Upfront instances = USD 326 (USD 27.16 monthly)
If you would like to use our service for setting up your SocialEngine based community on Amazon AWS infrastructure, or to migrate your existing SocialEngine website from a different hosting to Amazon AWS, then please order our services: ”SocialEngine Setup and Installation on Amazon Cloud (AWS)” and "Speeding up your SocialEngine Website".
To see their respective pricings, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ .
For the best experience and economical costing, you should launch on instance types that are appropriate for your website. With Amazon AWS, you have the flexibility to choose the combination of instance types most appropriate for your website today, and then choose a different instance size as your business and website needs change. If your website is in the nascent stages and if you have crossed the Free Usage Tier's limits, then you can go for the "m3.medium" instance type.
We recommend that after about a month of setting up your website on AWS (by then you would get an idea of the resources your community needs), you should make your instances "Reserved" to save costs.
