WordPress Certified by Bitnami and Automattic
Bitnami by VMware | 6.5.2-4-r04 on Debian 12Linux/Unix, Debian 12 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Bitnami fails at Canned App 101
Okay, Wordpress should be the #1 easiest LAMP app to show off how great your cloud platform is, and this is garbage. Stick to something modern and well-done with containers. Bitnami dropped the ball, and can't recover from poor execution. If you can't even get Wordpress right, you've failed as a company, and this should be their best foot forward. You'd be much better off to either go fully-hosted with a site like Wordpress itself, Bluehost, etc., or rolling your own on an ec2 instance. I'd like to think that there's something in between, but probably not. Digital Ocean's WP instances might be somewhere in the middle - e.g. the sweet spot that Bitnami is totally missing. I think they spend too much time with builds for 50,000 platforms, and not enough making this stuff usable.
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Not quite easy as it seems, once you dig in
The install is straight forward, and as easy as can be.
That's when the dream stops and the nightmares begin. For example, if you need to find the password, there is an easy way to do it, as in every case -
once you know how! - the password is logged once, and needs to be gotten to at first install. If for any other reason, you reboot the instance before getting the password - the pw is literally lost forever(in AWS). Again, there is an another way, but that means diggin in, and rolling in the mud when it's snowing out, and freezing. In other words - not pretty!
Another example - if you need to change the WP site URL, which is a matter of 10 seconds in every other install, it's a fairly complicated rigmarole here. I mean the wp-config.php file can only gotten to after being proficient in linux..or shooting commands suggested by strangers..so you are literally hitting 'enter' not knowing if this is going to destroy your instance or fix it like they said.
As I said, It's a fair bit of work, after the install. Be prepared. 1 star all the way - Bitnami does not keep it's promise. If the wp-config file is accessible, maybe I'll change my mind coming back - this is part of a normal install and every living human being trying their hand at WP needs to change URL. Or your Wordpress site WILL GO DOWN AFTER A FEW DAYS - because AWS feels like they need to swap IPs...and the circle jerk continues! I'm out, screw BItnami
Annoying
I could already access the instance from the IP, I had to generate the elastic IP but I do not know why the instance does not show IPv4 Public DNS, besides I do not know why I can not install an Elastic Load Balancer
Password doesn't work
Followed Amazon's instructions on setting this up, twice. Each time the generated password (in system log) failed when trying to login.
WASTE OF TIME
Spent a good 1.5 hours trying to find the password. Turns out it never generated. Went with another wordpress install. SUPER ANNOYING!
file permission wordpress plugin problem
You face file permission problem with wordpress and it's plugins. Some of them can't create folders and files. You can't change style (css). Google's PageSpeed module for apache is installed and turned on, that can be unexpected and unwilling.
Terrible experience
For an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) you would expect that it is truly turn key and ready to go.
It simply isn't. And the documentation that is offered on the marketplace page is completely wrong.
The password CANNOT be found in the system log for the instance. Therefore you get a wordpress installation that you can't even log into! Very useful!
If you're not careful you might not even get an instance with a public IP address (Bitnami makes no effort to warn you about this problem).
If you can't get access to the password for the installations (wordpress, mysql) then what is the point of using this image?
Really horrendous performance.
Don't bother. As a startup trying to operate on lean principles, this has cause me more headaches than if I just setup on a basic VPS.
no permissions for wordpress
+ a lot of documentation
+ easy to setup
- no permissions for wordpress to change theme-style
- no permissions for wordpress to change plugins
- no documentation for that problem
useless spending a lot of time on that setup
Too Complicated to Get Up and Running
People migrating to AWS from other hosting platforms are likely used to one-click installs of Wordpress from cPanel and other hosting management solutions. Just getting things up and running with an instance, security groups, elastic IP, and Route53 DNS "stuff" is a steep learning curve. Discovering that the Wordpress installation is not in the root directory of the domain and that one has to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get the thing working just adds to the frustration.
I ended up un-installing the instance and went with the YAPIXX instance from Oblaksoft because it is already connected to Amazon's S3 storage for hosting media files with the WP2Cloud plugin and the only extra step in addition to a typical one-click Wordpress install was adding three lines of authorization to actually get the EC2 server to talk with the S3 storage platform. That and firing up the typical security group, elastic ip, and tweaking a file to allow SFTP access to the server files for editing.