I'm managing about 100 basic PHP websites, primarily for smaller local businesses and charities. While most of these sites have low traffic, a few do attract some visitors. Right now, they're all on a fully-managed VPN, but I'm considering moving them to different hosting options. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to separate them into their own instances instead of having everything on one server, but I'm not sure if that would be too complicated to manage. Would AWS Lightsail be a good fit for us, or are there better alternatives? I've also looked into EC2, but it seems like it might be more than I need. Perhaps I could use a few EC2 instances and distribute the sites between them? I'm looking for advice from anyone with experience in managing client websites. Thanks!
5 Answers
If you don’t need ultra-high reliability, Fargate ECS could be a solid option. It allows each site to run in its own container, making it easy to manage different PHP versions and configurations. You can also set up an application load balancer for SSL management and automatic scaling. For databases, I’d recommend RDS if you can stick to a couple of standard versions since it's generally easier to manage than individual database instances.
First, see if you can consolidate some of those sites. Managing many websites with different PHP versions can get messy, especially when you need to update for security. If there are sites that can share a codebase or be clustered, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble in the long run. I had a similar situation and moved everything to a multi-tenant CMS, which made things much easier to handle.
You might want to consider Stacktape. It's a PaaS that integrates directly with your AWS account and is designed to handle multiple applications easily. They offer solutions like AWS ECS behind a load balancer for your sites with options between Fargate and EC2. Stacktape could simplify management and improve reliability while offering good security features too.
If AWS seems a bit overwhelming and you aren't super tech-savvy, you might want to check out Cloudways or Ploi with DigitalOcean or Vultr. They’re really user-friendly and affordable. Plus, you can still use MariaDB without migrating everything to a different database. DigitalOcean’s managed databases can handle most of your needs without too much fuss.
But remember, DigitalOcean also gets attacked quite often, and AWS offers better DDoS protection with WAF. It's worth considering your security needs!
Splitting everything might lead to substantial costs. Running separate containers and databases could rack up to around $2000/month. It might be more cost-effective to keep using your EC2 instance with a public IP instead of going all out with individual setups.
I agree! ECS Fargate’s features like scaling and self-healing would be reliable enough, plus the RDS for MariaDB would make managing your databases much simpler.