I'm running an eCommerce website that allows customers to upload 100-200 photos for a photo print product. Currently, I'm hosted on Cloudways, but I'm frustrated with the severely throttled upload speeds, getting just around 250kbps regardless of my internet speed. In contrast, I can easily achieve 7-8MBPS when uploading to Google Drive. I've tried various options on Cloudways, but nothing has improved the situation. I'm considering migrating to AWS for better, unrestricted upload speeds. Should I choose Lightsail or EC2 for this? I anticipate around 20-30 orders daily, each with over 100 high-resolution photo uploads. As a solo founder, I want to avoid spending all day managing the server, especially since I've found managed WordPress hosting options to be equally restrictive on upload speeds (I also tried Hostinger).
4 Answers
Have you considered using AWS Elastic Beanstalk? It might be a good alternative for your needs if you're looking for a solution that requires less management overhead.
Keep in mind that both EC2 and Lightsail can still restrict upload speeds based on the instance size. While they might be faster than your current host, they still won’t be entirely unrestricted. For a significant speed boost, consider using S3 presigned URLs with S3 Transfer Acceleration.
For your situation, it might be best to use Amazon S3 for uploads directly using a signed URL. This would bypass the compute instance altogether and allow users to upload their photos directly to S3, which can greatly enhance speed without adding much hassle for you.
Also, remember to look into transfer costs if you plan to download those images later. Lightsail offers some included transfer which could save you a lot compared to EC2. Just keep in mind that EC2 has more features but is a bit more complex to manage.
I actually use a plugin that uploads images to my server first before they are moved to S3. Is there a way to configure that for direct uploads?