Before I discovered AWS, my personal website was hosted on weebly. I liked weebly a lot, it was easy and powerful. However as a CS major i felt uneasy for using weebly. I should be able to host my own website and maintain my server. (I hope I don’t get hacked…) That is why I decided to move my website to my own server. First of all, I adore AWS. I really like it. Why?
Customer support is A+. I accidentally activated my 1 year free account while I was a freshman. So it expired when I was about to finish sophomore year. I did not even touch it at that time. I wrote this to AWS and they reset my one year free tier. <3
RDS service is quite useful, it has many different databases supported.
Lots of different products that make backend much easier.
However as I heard, Google is coming fast and hard. Amazon is a little more pricey compared to Google. I also met a high-level executive from Google Cloud this summer, and also asked his opinion about AWS 😀 (I love risky questions). He told about their infrastructure and how it can fail anytime unlike Amazon S3. Also mentioned that they don’t even use TCP/IP inside the data centers 😀 (sick), and also we talked a bit about security. I knew that Google manufactured her own network hardware but oh boy, they have so much more than that. Overall he said that they will catch Amazon soon, and I think they might.
However I’m grateful with what Amazon provided me up to know, therefore as a loyal customer, I will be using AWS in near future commercially and also personally. If conditions become to harsh then I might consider a change.
Actually the best solution would be using both of them.
At the moment I’m running WordPress on Apache server on my AWS EC2 instance. I also have some custom software that communicates with my IoT devices in Turkey and also in U.S. From time to time I’m routing drone communications through my AWS server. However I can’t route video feed that well due that the micro EC2 instance is not suitable for that kind of load, or my software needs more optimization.
I recently added a ssl certificate that I bought from namecheap. I spent around 9.99$ for a basic ssl certificate. Interestingly, other vendors such as go daddy and so, charge minimum of 59$ for the same certificate. I reached out to them to ask what is the difference between their certificate and the namecheap one, they did not reply. That’s another topic to discuss. I had lots of difficulties installing the ssl certificate to the wordpress installation. Many of my previous content on the website had “http://” adresses therefore when I switched to https, I had lots of missing pictures and javascript files. I could go through the MySQL db and alter them using a python script but I decided to install wordpress from scratch just for the sake of learning and also cleanup.
Issues that I’ve encountered and how I solved them
1) I was getting a http error whenever I tried to upload a file that is bigger than 1mb (HTTP Error wordpress photo upload)
I found out that this is a restriction by nginx, the default size for file uploads are 1mb, you have to edit the file in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and add client_max_body_size 20M; to it. After that restart the nginx service. Here is the article that helped me to discover the issue.
