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Amazon AWS web hosting & Ventraip Australia – ALL GOOD

A Technical Overview

Placing small client websites onto Amazon or Ventraip Australia will be approximately the same cost, if not a little more on Amazon due to static IP4 address charges. The way to reduce Amazon charges is to pay for a yearly discount with a Reserved Instance. If you want that static IP address, then Amazon it is.

A typical Amazon configuration is t4g.micro on GP3 disk. If a website is very “thin” with low visitor numbers, a t4g.nano may be viable if reviewed as appropriate. A typical Ventraip configuration must have a minimum of 2CPU, 2GB RAM. There really is no viable option to go below this even if it seems to work. Amazon gets away with smaller configurations as it provides what we call Burst CPU.

Amazon and Ventraip servers are in Australia, excepting that Amazon email is via Oregon. Some companies have servers overseas. This raises various questions around clients and geographical location of data, longer hard-set performance times for initial handshake communications, and geographical risk such as typhoons, or even cultural differences in how we are treated on support calls.

Being a public article, I am unable to describe various issues around email and providers, but I may recommend Ventraip free email for minimal use of email. Outside of that I personally would recommend MS Exchange. MS Exchange of course has a learning curve to get it up and running. When a provider offers non-Microsoft email products, there is a level of uncertainty until the products are tested, so I would advise monthly subscriptions so that major faults that are unable to be resolved can cancel a service without losing money from an annual subscription.

Email problems that can arise involve loss of email to OUATH2 servers, syncing issues, immediate rejection of valid email addresses or unacceptable delay times. Using MS Exchange with WordPress WP SMTP plugin requires a support call from Microsoft to permit SMTP, and to possibly unblock your domain name which can be blocked outside of the configurations you have access to.

Ventraip Australia configures free SSL certificates, and makes use of the popular cPanel interface. Ventraip gives some options within cPanel that another provider may or may not offer. This can be important.

Ventraip (and various other companies) make use of LiteSpeed rather than Apache httpd. This gives fast web page display. The only way to do this in Amazon is to install Debian 11 or Debian 12 with either the free OpenLiteSpeed, or the paid LiteSpeed, or to install Nginx instead of Apache. I recommend Nginx as my observation has been it is the fastest performer. I have used OpenLiteSpeed but an extent of configurations are required. If one upgrades PHP and finds a problem, going back to an earlier version of PHP may or may not bring a site down. This experience would vary I gather from administrator to administrator and what operating system platform they are using or have configured. As a former solutions architect, I do not allow myself to work with risk above a certain perceived level which includes repetition of issues. I will point out we do have clients on all platforms listed above.

Nginx is easier to build and configure in my view than Apache. It uses a master process with worker processes. It generally will use less disk swap space then Apache on a small Amazon EC2 instance. I run a crontab script each night to verify swap space is not overloaded, and if so, restart Nginx, Mariadb, and php-fpm.

I have not tested other performance options so far with Nginx and cannot say what happens under strong load just yet. However, Apache on http/1 chews up swap space faster than you can eat a good home made steak and vegie pie!

LiteSpeed, Apache, Nginx all allow the use of multiple domains. It is a bit of a challenge to learn how to use free LetsEncrypt SSL certificates.

To date I have been fine by installing the default 8GB disk. If more is needed, one can mount a GP3 volume. All EC2 configurations can be done on the AMI versions with Linux2023 or Debian.

Comparison Table

I will outline the key advantages of Amazon AWS Web Hosting compared to other Australian-based services. The Y/N column relates to definite benefits of Amazon. “y (or n) – depending” depends on what you want to do.

All comparisons are based on an administrator having strong Unix/Linux and problem solving skills, and a large long-term learning curve with other necessary AWS services such as IAM, Lambda, SES, Cloudwatch, S3, EC2, Route53, SNS, Accounting etc.

The discussion relates to simple workloads for individuals or sole traders, and Small Business with websites not being overloaded, perhaps 50 to 100 visitors per day. Larger loads may mean the business revenue is greater than $500K per year, and then moving into team support and things like RAID disk etc.

AWS makes sense for a small business of any size.

Advantage for AWS	Amazon AWS	Aussie Hosting
y	Leverage enterprise quality services, choice of OS, hardware & software. VPS rather than shared.	Shared infrastructure, with no choice of OS, hardware & often software. VPS costs prohibitive. You don't know how old the hardware is - not just disks, but networking. Providers can change the hardware without telling you - sometimes disastrous, sometimes not.
y	Preferred for Small Business and Sole Traders	Significant higher cost for recommended Business plans.
y	Reliable .tar file backups, and full image "snapshots" for immediate recovery.	Higher .tar file backup failures on older systems. Should be ok today.
y	Faster performance due to initial handshake time.	Can be slower server initial response times - these are hardwired, so no improvements possible.
n/a	Damage to hard disks - consider as the same for everyone	Damage to hard disks - consider as the same for everyone
y	Use of (paid) Static IP4 address is mandatory - good for reputation and speed	Shared IP address pool - longer time to process data packets, and reputations may be damaged by other bad users of the same address. Generally not a problem for every day websites.
y	Tight levels of security with your control.	Subject to shared server security failures, your own limited security control. What happens when the provider drops security accidentally during maintenance?
y or n - depending	Servers in Australia (except email - in Orgeon)	Most provider servers outside Australia. Ventraip is IN Australia, inc. email.
n/a	Full email options for external email like MS Exchange	Same
y	Ability to add Linux packages, play with new scripts and software. For example, iptables, whois, mutt, IP2 location, etc.	Shared systems have no access to many OS commands, & unable to install various Linux packages. Some providers give no SSH access, or have too low a limit on PHP memory configurations. Some will not permit shell_exec to run scripts, or Linux shell scripts. e.g. Ventraip allows you to install the aws command to access S3 buckets with Python 3.8, or to run PHP/Unix commands by changing PHP options, and some providers don't allow.
y - depending	Ability to use mysql commands, create DB and User names, or dedicate DB to another server.	No ability to create your own DB names and users.
y - depending	Administrator management easy - for Linux skilled folks.	While SSH and FileZilla can be configured, still a little more awkward to race in and manage what a Unix administrator is used to.
y	Sudden CPU loads - "burst cpu", and use of disk swap space.	A different architecture. Performance should be okay for the level of service sizing. If Amazon uses Apache and a provider uses OpenLiteSpeed, it is likely Amazon will be slower on smaller sizes isntances, but editing WordPress pages is still faster on Amazon.
y	Use of free SSL certificates, or paid commercial SSL.	Some providers charge enormous SSL prices that outweigh the benefits of their plan pricing. Once paid certificates are deployed there are issues with access to DNS CAA records and that pricing as well.
y or n - depending	Amazon DNS is either its own Route53 or external. Includes CAA, and automatic PTR records you don't have to worry about.	Depends on the providers DNS management pricing.
y or n - depending	Domain registration ok.	Provider domain name pricing varies from reasonable to outrageous.
n/a	Amazon is On-Demand monthly pricing with one discount on the web hosting component. People are used to monthly pricing nowadays. Can be a little annoying at times to have USD exchange rate, plus GST to AUD.	Annual pricing.
n	No real free email forwarding software - takes a lot to develop one's own scripts to forward to a single address as an attachment. A business should not use forwarding anyway.	Email forwarding often provided, usually free.
n	Huge learning curves with long-time personal investment across several AWS services. Lots of problem solving. If you can get across it all, there are sales advantages as listed above.	Simplified installations.
n/a	Total annual pricing - can be similar to other providers above or below. It is not worth quibbling with $50 difference if the benefits are clear.	Pricing varies a lot with providers. Most would still be higher than AWS services, but some are close to their pricing. To keep in mind is that we prefer services in Australia.
n	More maintenance is needed for clients on AWS regarding the operating system. You would not keep the same OS for 7 years, but rebuild the entire system on newer OS and Hardware in that time, rebuilding with the WordPress database and files.	Normal WordPress maintenance tasks.
y	Extra disk is cheap. You can also link into S3 storage at negligible cost.	Extra disk is a significant cost.
y	If CDN is a requirement, Amazon provides at nonimal storage cost with a free SSL certificate.	CDN is a significant cost.
n	Quite difficult to install and maintain OpenLiteSpeed as an alternative to Apache.	Some providers (now most?) use OpenLiteSpeed. Amazon needs Debian OS to install OpenLiteSpeed as its Linux brand (such as Linux 2023) is incompatible. I don't use Ubuntu - (enough said).
y	No WordPress pages take several seconds (or freeze) during editing.	There can be frustrating delays when editing in wp-admin mode.
n/a	Accounting configurations are for one account owner only, not several clients being billed separately on the same account to their own credit cards. Tags can configure invoicing to different clients on the same account though - more complex configurations.	One client, one account is the usual structure. Wholesale accounts may vary how billing is done.