Web Hosting

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The Challenge

When looking for a solution to host a web site, businesses are faced with a variety of options: buy and build their own data center, outsource it to a co-location facility with managed or dedicated server offerings, or utilize cloud-based solutions. Regardless of the solution, companies need to find hosting infrastructure that ensures maximum security, reliability, and performance. Cost – up-front costs and ongoing expenses – and flexibility are also important considerations for companies of all sizes.

For companies that are looking to reserve capital and reduce up-front expenses, cloud solutions are a popular choice. Plus, cloud solutions allow webmasters and web site owners to scale up if successful, and scale down when necessary. If you are looking for a cloud environment to host your web application, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the up-front and ongoing costs to host my website? Are their any hidden fees or overage charges?
• Can I use the programming languages and web application platform of my choice?
• Can I use the operating systems and environments on which my existing website is already deployed?
• Does the provider have a track record of operating highly available and dependable web infrastructure?
• What will happen when sudden and unforeseen demand results in massive spikes in usage of my web application? How fast can I add (or subtract) capacity?

Web Hosting Using AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers reliable, scalable, and cost-effective compute and storage resources on which to host your web applications. You can use the following AWS components alone or combined to build your scalable website:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources. Learn more

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 stores multiple redundant copies of your data. Learn more

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable database capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks. Learn more

Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon SimpleDB provides the core database functions of data indexing and querying. You can write your applications to take advantage of Amazon SimpleDB’s simplicity and its ability to scale seamlessly. Learn more

Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront provides a high performance, globally distributed content delivery system. Your application can use Amazon CloudFront to easily distribute or stream content to your users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, no commitments, and seamless integration with Amazon S3. Learn more

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). Amazon SQS provides a high performance, secure queuing system for your application that enables you to reliably distribute work between your website’s processes. Learn more

Amazon Mechanical Turk. The Amazon Mechanical Turk service is a marketplace for work and provides programmatic access to human intelligence. This service can be used to provide human judgment on-demand, cost effectively and at any scale. For example, Mechanical Turk workers can offer image tagging or data cleansing on your website, or help evaluate user-generated content on your site and feed their results into your algorithms. Learn more

Benefits at a Glance

Easy to use. AWS is designed to minimize much of the heavy lifting of setting up and managing your own IT infrastructure. You don’t need to purchase and configure hardware. You can get started with AWS in minutes and take your idea and deploy it to your customers with minimal friction. And, you can use the AWS Management Console, a variety of third-party management tools, or the well-document AWS web service APIs to manage and maintain your cloud infrastructure.

Flexible. AWS enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, software, and other services you need. This eases the migration process for existing applications while preserving options for building new solutions.

Cost-Effective. You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

Reliable. With AWS, you take advantage of scalable, reliable, and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar retail business that has been honed for over a decade.

Scalable and high-performance. Using AWS tools, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to the compute and storage resources when you need them.

Secure. AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.

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