Tag: Lightsail

Experimenting with & Moving to AWS – Part 2

This is a follow up to my previous post – Experimenting with moving to AWS

All went well with AWS Lightsail, it’s a very serviceable VPS solution, but now I’ve had a bit of time in AWS I’ve migrated the site further to EC2. It was a simple enough process, snapshot the Lightsail machine and export that as an EC2 AMI and EBS snapshot, and then cloned the whole lot from London to Ireland. The move of regions was because I have some other data already in Ireland and wanted to keep the site in the same region now.

Off the back of all that I’ve got my IPv6 connectivity back to the site again, as Lightsail does not support IPv6 addressing, which is a bit of a negative point there of Lightsail. EC2 instances however, most certainly do support IPv6.

I’ve also gone as far as migrating DNS management into Route53 from Google Domains, mainly to simplify managing the domain zone.

The instance type the site is now running on is also one of the newer AMD EPYC EC2 instance types, which work out slightly cheaper than the equivalent Intel instances, so keep an eye on the instances suffixed with “a”, as you can save a bit of money there.

Experimenting with & Moving to AWS – Part 1

So, in my work environment, I’ve been heavily based in the VMware and “traditional data centre” world, covering all the usual stuff, as well as some very modern technologies like VSAN.

However, a need has now arisen for me to start skilling up in AWS technologies. So as of last week, my journey into cloud technologies has begun, and I’ve been using the fantastic A Cloud Guru site for their great courses on AWS. I’m starting from the ground up, with very little experience of AWS, so it should be an interesting path for me.

On a related note, for an easy in to AWS, I’ve migrated this site to now live in AWS via their Lightsail platform. For what you get, it’s very cheap and has allowed me to start to experiment with AWS technologies. I’d recommend it to anyone looking at self-hosting WordPress sites. Give it a go, you can get a free month and try things out. Overall, even though the specs of the basic entry-level server look very diminutive, but I’ve found the performance to be great in reality.

I’ll report back when I’m a little further on with the learning, but just for your information, the path I’ve started down is the AWS Certified Solutions Architect, starting with the associate level and hopefully working up to professional level eventually.

Wish me luck!!!