WordPress Multisite Certified by Bitnami and Automattic
Bitnami by VMware | 6.5.2-3-r03 on Debian 12Linux/Unix, Debian 12 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
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Better Than Advertised!!!
I've been using the Bitnami Wordpress 4.0.1 Multisite for about 2.5 months now. I'm getting ready to upgrade the servers and Wordpress so was researching here. This is the first time I actually read these reviews and I couldn't help but add in my 2 Cents.
Just a brief background I'm Using Bitnami's Wordpress Multisite 4.0.1 Stack, using AWS Free Tier as follows;
- EC2 Elastic Load Balancer,
- EC2 T2-Micro -Wordpress, PHP, PHP-FPM cacheing only(No DB, or Files saved here),
- Elasticache 1 Node- Memcached linked to Wordpress Server.
- RDS T2-Micro -Database Server,
- S3 Bucket- Stores all files, backups etc.
- Cloudfront- Serves Cached files from edge servers.
- over 25 Plugins on 3 different sites.
ALL AWS Free Tier, last months bill was about $0.23. And yes it will auto-scale too. But I normally turn it off as it almost always want's to start spinning up more servers. Traffic on my site has outgrown what a T2-Micro can handle.
My setup was Tons of work but works great for a very small very low traffic website. The issue is because of how T2/T2 Micro instances work. You are going to have issues if you have too many pages(more than 12-15), or if you have a more than 3 sites (multisite). Especially when being indexed, or working in the backend, during high traffic times. Its because of how AWS has them configured. But then again what do you expect for a 'free' 1 year trial?
There is ways that you can optimise your T2 but its a lot more work and I think its much smarter to just upgrade the server to anything above a "T" server. Yes the issue is with all "T" instances. As they are setup to "Burst" for up to 10 seconds, then AWS will throttle it back by 97%! Which makes your site not load, white screen, etc.
They're fine to get started, and for testing. But once you start getting indexed by lots of search engines and start seeing more traffic. Upgrade! Read about reserved & spot instances, you can save a ton.
Enough about me...
1. This is NOT Shared Hosting! If you have never used Linux command line, have no experience with Linux at all, don't know how to configure MySQL, PHP, Apache, etc, or worse yet, what they do or are. Then this is not the way you should go. And in all seriousness, neither is AWS for that matter.
Insted go to Bitnami's website and sign up for their service. Its pretty easy to setup and shows you how to link your new Bitnami Account to your AWS Account. You can now use the Bitnami tools to create and work with instances. It is MUCH simpler than using AWS directly.
If you need more advanced or Multi server setups for your live/production blog, etc. Find a professional and get it done right. Make sure they have done it before several times, and can prove it. Wordpress setups like mine above or the new setup I'm now building are VERY complicated, even using Bitnami's AMI.
2. R.T.F.M. is something I was taught when I first started learning Linux. Do a search for it. It will help you tremendously!
3. Bitnami easily has one of the best documentation sets I've seen, or used. Not only is it well organized, it shows you exactly what to do and gives you the exact thing to type in the terminal. They also have instructions for Tons of different ways to reconfigure it as well. Don't just blindly start setting up the stuff. If you don't know what it is search it first.
- Bitnami's Doc's Link:
https://wiki.bitnami.com/Applications/BitNami_Wordpress
4. In the link above is the Full Doc Set for all of the various Bitnami Stack options. If your not reading all of the Wordpress & Wordpress Multisite sections you absolutely must. (Or at least don't complain if or when you can't get it working right.) Reading the PHP, Apache & MySQL sections is a absolute must too.
5. Even if you do know your way around a LAMP Stack still, check with the Bitnami Doc's before you do anything. Bitnami's Stack Build is not like a standard 'build it yourself' server. It took me a while to learn "their way".
6. Even things that I couldn't find in Bitnami documentation was still easily found on other sites. Bitnami is pretty widely used and as such all over the web.
I highly recommend using Bitnami AMI's, I've tried several of them now, and WILL continue to for some time. It saves tons of time not having to start from scratch. From installing, configuring, securing, tracking your changes and documenting for a production web server. Plus there's support, how to's, forums, etc.
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no t2.micro support
It will not run on a t2.micro.
They have not included it as a supported platform.
Finding login information for this product is hard.
You also have to hunt for all the config and log files as they are not in standard linux places
Great Product, makes server side really easy!
The Bitnami Wordpress Stack is excellent when hosting on a dedicated server such as Amazon EC2.
All the necessary components are taken care of with excellent documentation. These guys have cut down the learning curve to setup servers to half or even lesser.
Definitely recommend the Bitnami wordpress multisite image to anybody who would like to setup a wordpress multisite network.
Best Wishes and a Big Thank you!
Santosh Ramachandran
Poor initial experience
Deployed the image and followed pages and links from the Bitnami's site and never could get logged into the Wordpress Admin Console ( /admin). Their instructions list a default user (that seemed valid), but the password for an AMI (non-CloudFront) instance failed. I'd love to rate this higher (I've installed Wordpress on CentOS before quite easily, but this was NOT the experience I would have expected for a pre-built image.
Definitely not plug and play
After the AMI is ready in AWS the hunt for information starts. It starts with finding what the login info for Wordpress admin is (to be found somewhere on the Bitnami sites FAQ). Then logging in with SSH to the console is also not intuitive if you haven't done it before. It's more complicated than just entering a user and password. However to be fair, the super secure SSH login is an Amazon thing and not directly connected to the Bitnami installation.
The reason to login to the console at all is if you don't want your Wordpress installation in a subdirectory like the default (/wordpress) then it's getting really complicated. And actually that was the point I gave up. Even though some instructions were provided, they simply don't work. The command you are supposed to enter give a "command not found" error and the so called "manual way" asks me to edit files I don't have in my directory.
Free Tier Eligible Description Is Misleading
Signed up for the Free Tier. Selected this product to install because the description said it was Free Tier Eligible in "bold". During the install was promptly warned it would not perform properly if installed at the Free Tier level. Completed the install with no issues as I was curious to see if it would even start correctly but it did. Then I deleted the server as it is useless to install something to test when you know in advance from the manufacturer that it won't run properly.
Tried the install on a Windows Server image that was "Free Tier Eligible" as well and that "Free Tier" image not only said it would NOT run correctly unless you installed it on a server two levels above the Free Tier, the disk image was larger all by itself than my entire Free Tier allocation.
I REALLY HATE bait and switch. Went back to my shared host to do my testing as I can't really use the Free Tier to test as nothing can be installed that's stronger than a pocket calculator at the Free Tier level.
This image and the Windows Server image "may" be great but the Free Tier language in this and the Windows Images is totally misleading. For that reason I give it an F along with the Free Tier program.
To run a couple of test servers at the proper computing level will cost me way more than at a shared host. I may come back when I get ready for production but for a startup incubator type of situation where you are trying to keep your costs as low as possible there are cheaper solutions out there.
I could use a more dummy proofed SSH setup.
I can't really review too harshly because the webpage setup was pretty easy. But if you want to SSH in its a little trickier. The bitnami guides aren't taylored to EC2. For instance one guide keeps saying to copy the .pem file or to chmod the .pem file. I don't know how! Nor do i know the location of it because i can't ssh in. I'm sure i'm missing one simple line in the guide. I'll reread then ask for help. Their support is pretty good.
Multisite at your fingerprints
This solution is great! It takes a few seconds and click to build your own multisite.
Yet, I still would love a step by step explanation of how to change multisite URL and sub-domains, specific to AWS, because I am still struggling with this issue. Somehow I will figure it out but it shouldn't be so frustrating to find a guide about this. But all and all, this is my problem and the product deserves a high-five.
Works fine after initial glitch
I installed it but I could not figure out how to connect to the instance. After a while an automatic mail arrived showing default user and password
Great
I love this AMI
It's very useful because it is saving my time.
It reduced my time-consuming job.
Thank you very much