Thursday, August 1, 2013

Climbing Towards the Cloud(s)

In late June 2013, the staff at YSFlight Headquarters made the decision that it was time to migrate to a new host. Previously, we were on shared hosting at GoDaddy, which was too slow for our needs and didn't allow us to adjust some configuration parameters needed to optimize our applications. After some discussion, we decided that YSFHQ was no longer going to be on a shared server (at the OS level).

Next, we started searching. Initially, we thought that a standard VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server would be able to suit our needs, while giving us some room to grow. And then we looked at the price. Being a small flight simulator community, our finances are pretty limited, and since everything on our website is free, there is no continuous revenue stream. These constraints put aside the thought of getting our own VPS or dedicated server.

However, I had recently learned about the power of cloud hosting - it brings the low cost you get from shared hosting and combines it with the power of scalability in the cloud. Considering we were going to do a big marketing push in the coming months, we wanted to make sure our hosting provider was able to deliver the performance we needed. Especially because our current load times were 8s at peak hours, which was driving potential users away from the site.

In the current scene of cloud computing, there are multiple big names out there. The elephant in the room is Amazon Web Services, powering small developer test sites and blogs all the way to the president's re-election campaign website (you can learn more about the Obama campaign's use of AWS at awsofa.info). There are also major hosting providers like Rackspace, Linode, and others. One of the fastest-growing cloud hosting providers in the industry is DigitalOcean, which offers a price less than AWS, but without all the advanced features you get from AWS.

Given the various pricing options, we decided to try out DigitalOcean for a week. Here's what our stack looked like:

  • Hardware: 512MB of memory, 1 CPU, 20GB SSD, 1TB bandwidth
  • OS: Ubuntu 12.04 x64
  • Web Server: Apache 2.2
  • PHP version: 5.4
  • Database: MySQL 5.5
  • Caching modules: php-apc
  • Application: phpBB 3 (Drupal was not migrated)
After about a day into the test, the site was suffering from out-of-memory errors and was generally slow. We then decided to up our hardware package to 1GB memory, with a 30GB SSD. Unfortunately, this upgrade did not help when paired with our poorly-optimized stack. Database queries continued to bog down the site.

Considering AWS offered a very attractive price point - the "free tier" - we decided to give Amazon Web Services a try. In early July, we switched our forum to AWS. Here's what the new stack looked like:
  • 1x t1.micro EC2 instance, running the Amazon Linux AMI
  • 1x t1.micro RDS instance, running MySQL 5.6
  • 1x t1.micro ElastiCache node, running memcached
  • Web Server: nginx 1.1.x
  • PHP version 5.4.x via php-fpm
  • Caching modules: php-apc
  • Application: phpBB 3 (again, Drupal not migrated)
This proved to be a great setup for us. Load times dropped to 500ms at peak, and was averaging at around 300ms. Memcached provided excellent database caching for phpBB (read about how to enable it here), and since we didn't have to worry about configuring MySQL, it proved to be quite fast on RDS.

Last week, we moved to a new EC2 instance, running on Ubuntu 12.04 x64. This was configured to include our different environments, and was optimized for speed and stability. We've been running great, with minimal downtime.

Lessons Learned:
  • Always consider cost/performance ratio
  • Use caching whenever possible
  • If you don't know how to optimize your config, pick a platform that does it for you
  • Use the cloud to your advantage - don't hold on to hardware you don't need
  • If your instance breaks, make a new one (only on AWS)
  • Inform your users of any changes you will be making.
Hopefully this post provides some good advice for those that are looking to move to the cloud. Leave your questions in the comments below.

Happy Thursday,
Eric Tendian
Chief Technology Officer
YSFlight Headquarters

1 comment:

  1. I know HostGator is affordable. No limits on MySQL. No limit on Space. No Traffic Limits. Uses CPanel. And is like $10/m. Just something to look in to!

    http://www.hostgator.com/

    -Nolan

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