Migrating to AWS Lowers Website Costs by 30%

Dingore had read about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and learned that the members of the MilesWeb IT team were already familiar with the AWS Cloud. He saw that with widespread AWS Regions and multiple Availability Zones, MilesWeb could host virtual servers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in countries, such as India and the United States, that are halfway around the world from each other and still stay compliant with local data regulations.

Furthermore, firewalls built into Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environments—in which customer websites would sit—gave Dingore the security assurances he required. “Besides firewalls, Amazon VPC provides us with a high level of security down to the subnet level. The difference between AWS and our hosting providers is that we have greater command over which ports are open with AWS. We are now able to control data connections and flows more effectively to reduce the risk of security breaches."

MilesWeb migrated most of its 8,000 websites to AWS in roughly 30 days, using a Linux-based web-hosting management tool called cPanel. Migration was done during weekends when website traffic decreased. MilesWeb moved websites from a total of 30 on-premises servers to the AWS Cloud— approximately 30 TB of data. Comments Dingore, “Migration was a straightforward process, with minor scripting, to transfer accounts from our servers to AWS.”

MilesWeb moved the websites to next-generation Amazon EC2 M5 Instances, which offer a balance of compute, memory, and networking resources for a broad range of workloads. The company also adopted Amazon Lightsail, a service that includes virtual machine (VM) instances, static IP addresses, server monitoring, solid-state disk block storage, firewall protection, and DNS. Dingore says, “The service is easy to use, and the pricing is transparent. You choose a plan that reflects how much memory, processing speed, and disk space you require, plus the amount of data you expect to be processed.”

The company has seen network latency reduced by just less than a third after moving to AWS. “In the past, we would have customers complain about latency impacting the user experience,” says Dingore. “It took 5 to 6 seconds for a website to load, but, since moving to AWS, load times have been cut to 3.5 to 4 seconds—a reduction of around 30 percent.”

MilesWeb has also reduced IT management time now that it no longer administers leased and colocated servers. The MilesWeb IT team controls its AWS infrastructure through a single management console. Using the console, the team can scale storage, add load balancers, and join multiple VMs for extra performance. “We manage every aspect of our AWS infrastructure using the console,” says Dingore. “We’ve reduced our management costs by 30 percent from the migration.”

Since migrating its websites to AWS, MilesWeb has faced zero downtime—ensuring customer websites are available 24/7. A reason for this high availability is the redundancy available with AWS. The business uses AWS instances across India, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US. It also makes use of the snapshotting service available to clone servers.

Today, MilesWeb is leveraging its AWS experience to offer its customers a management service. Dingore believes the service can meet the IT needs of many of its customers, most of which don’t have in-house IT personnel. For these customers, MilesWeb will manage migrating customers’ existing cloud or on-premises servers to AWS and oversee their day-to-day operation. “We launched the service just a few months ago, and we’re already seeing 10 to15 percent growth month-on-month,” says Dingore.