I run an eCommerce site where customers upload between 100-200 photos for a photo print product. Currently, I'm hosted on Cloudways, but I've noticed that my upload speeds are painfully slow, capped at around 250kbps. No matter how fast my internet is, uploads are throttled, while I can get 7-8MBPS speeds on Google Drive. It's been a struggle to find a good solution since managed WordPress hosting options also seem to throttle speeds. I'm considering shifting to AWS and I'm trying to decide between Lightsail and EC2. I expect about 20-30 orders a day, each with over 100 high-resolution photos uploaded. I'm a solo founder and don't want to spend all my time managing the server. What do you recommend?
4 Answers
To really enhance your upload speeds, you should aim to send uploads directly to S3 using a signed URL, bypassing your main server altogether. This setup can save you a lot of headaches and speed things right up!
Also, consider the transfer costs, especially if you plan to download the images later. Lightsail includes some transfer bandwidth which can help keep your costs down. EC2 offers more features but can be trickier to manage.
Just a heads up, both EC2 and Lightsail have restrictions on upload speed based on the instance size. They might perform better than your current host, but don’t expect completely unrestricted speeds. For a major speed boost, look into using S3 with presigned URLs and consider enabling S3 Transfer Acceleration too.
Have you looked into Elastic Beanstalk? It can help streamline deployments and scaling, depending on your needs.
That sounds useful! But I’m using a plugin that uploads to the server first before transferring to S3. Would this still work? Any recommendations on that?