Installing a website on some cloud hosting platforms like AWS is not always a lovely pie. Sometimes, it’ll be frustrating.
Let us consider you want to start a WordPress blog for product promotion and plan to host it on the AWS Cloud server. Can you install your blog on that particular cloud platform without any knowledge of server-side programming languages or experience, perhaps?
The answer is probably ‘No’. But you can, if you plan to host your WordPress blog on the AWS cloud platform using the Cloudways.
First of all, why should you host on the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Cloud?
Do you know why Amazon Web Service cloud hosting garners more customers? They have their servers in many parts of the world, and they hardly go offline. This means the applications on those servers almost have no downtime, which is a big benefit for businesses that earn through the internet.
AWS hosting is reliable and flexible. However, installing your blog on this platform is not as flexible as it is on the inside.
If you are not a programming wizard, you need to hire one to manage your blog on AWS to keep your site protected from malware and mischief regularly.
Benefits of using Cloudways to Host my WordPress blog on AWS?
Cloudways is a managed hosting platform where your server-side works will be managed by someone else without bothering you. Cloudways manages all the server configuration process and other integration processes that might involve installing some performance-oriented stack like Apache and Nginx.
With easy to understand user interface and menus, even a person without any previous experience programming could host a website on AWS like platforms with the help of Cloudways.
There are many other features of Cloudways that you might find helpful. Read them all in this separate article. Now, let’s get right into the topic.
How to Host a WordPress Blog on AWS Using Cloudways?
Installing a WordPress blog on Cloudways AWS server starts with a signup process with the Cloudways. Sign up with the platform either using any of your existing accounts with Google or LinkedIn or manually typing your name and mail ID.
Once you’re done with the signup process, you’ll be getting an email from Cloudways containing the activation link for your account; clicking the link would instantly activate your account.
Once you’ve been logged on to the platform, your will on the server dashboard, where you’ll see no existing servers that is working for you, this is where you’ll be launching your first server. Find the “Launch” button at the centre of the page and hit it. Soon, you’ll be taken to the page where you have to select the type of application; in this case, it’s WordPress (Version 5.5). Name your application, server and project. The names you enter in this section are for your own identification of the project and the server where it’s hosted.
Once you are done with the application selection and naming, now it’s time to select the server you want. As the article title is already about hosting AWS using the Cloudways, we choose the AWS server from the list of servers such as Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, and Google Cloud Platform.
Now you have to select the server size. As you’re an emerging blogger, it’s better to go with the smallest option that is two vCPU, 2 GB RAM. Do you know what the best thing about hosting on AWS using Cloudways is? You can scale your server size up and down according to the need; there won’t be any restriction.
The next step up in the process is selecting the bandwidth. Choose your required bandwidth, storage and database. However, the best part of this bandwidth selection is you pay only for what you use.
Finally, you one step ahead of getting your own server. Select a data centre location close to your targets. Hit the “Launch Now” button to launch your server and then move to configure the server.
As you are successfully installed WordPress on AWS using Cloudways. So, the next step is pointing the domain to WordPress.
As soon as the server gets created, your application hosted on it would be shown on your dashboard. Now click on the “Applications” from the top menu and then click on “WordPress”, which will open the server-side and application side setting together as “Application Management”.
Your next first action in this Application Management is to collect your access details. Click on the “Access Details” tab, and you will see the URL, Username and Password for your WordPress application, which are necessary to log in to your WordPress blog.
Find the “Domain Management” tab on the same page where you found the Access Details tab and click it. You’ll see a space that reads “Enter Primary Domain”. Enter your domain name in that, and finally, hit the “Save Changes” button at the bottom to launch your WordPress site on the AWS cloud platform using CloudWays. You can add all your subdomains on this same tab.
Now you’ve just explored the easiest way to host a WordPress Site on AWS with Cloudways. Why I’m saying it’s easy? If you want to know the answer, you need to know how to host a WordPress site on AWS without Cloudways. Here is the step-by-step guide for you to host your WordPress Site on AWS.
How to host a WordPress site on AWS without Cloudways?
Launching a Website on AWS cloud is all about doing everything manually. There is no automation on AWS, like in Cloudways.
Like every other hosting platforms, the first step is always the signing up process, so it’s necessary to skip this step instead of blabbering on something you already know.
Here comes the real first step:– The first step in AWS hosting in necessarily launching and setting up the EC2 (Amazon Elastic Computing 2). As soon as you are logged on to your AWS account, you’ll be on your dashboard.
From the menus on the top, find “Services” and click. Another dashboard that consists of AWS’s list of services to host your website would pop up. Find EC2 and click it from the services list.
EC2 dashboard would have popped up as soon as you clicked it. On the dashboard’s left menu, find and click “Instances” and then “Launch Instance”. Launching the instance is the first step in a big process.
The next step is selecting an Operating System for your application. Choose any OS your blog deserve and then move to the process of selecting RAM, vCPUs and instance type for the server. Based on your previous selection, an instance type would have been selected by default by the system, so all you have to do in this section is clicking the “Next: Configure Instance Details“.
A new page would appear where you always check the configuration and click Next. The next step is an optional step which is for adding another volume of storage. If there is none, click Next and move on to the final step to fill the Key and Value, then click the “Next: Configure Security Group” button at the bottom right corner of the page.
Soon, the security group configuration page will open. Check the “Create a new Security Group” box and then fill the respective filed such as “Security Groups Name” and “Description”.
Click the “Add Rule” button and select SSH, HTTP and HTTPS and their sources one after another. Leave the source box in “Anywhere” by default and move to Review and Launch. Click Launch to open a dialogue box in which you enter the Key Pair Name and download key pair, as a PEM file, to your offline storage. Then click the Launch Instance button at the bottom of the dialogue box. Note: The Key Pair cannot be downloaded again if you missed it.
Now, it’s not the time to rejoice because you’ve only done with launching the instance for your server. Once you launched the instance, you need to convert the PEM file to PPK then access your server through the PuTTY.
Launch the PuTTYgen app from your desktop and load the PEM file you that is downloaded before by clicking the Load an existing private key file. The PuTTY Key Generator would convert the PEM file into PPK for you. Then click the Save Private Key button to save the converted PPK file to your desktop.
Now it’s time to access your AWS server from the PuTTYgen app. Open the PuTTY and type “ec2-user@yourIPaddress” in the filed below the phrase “Specify the destination you want to connect to”. The IP address would be your server’s public IP whose series of number looks, for example:3.22.11.112/x.xx.xx.xxx.
Below the IP address field, you might see Connection types. Check the SSH box, and then, before hitting the Open button at the bottom, click the ‘Connections‘ at the left side menu. In the drop-down, click ‘SSH‘, which drops some more menu. Click ‘Auth‘ and click it. You can see the “Options Controlling SSH Authentication” and some default checked boxes on the right side.
Down below, browse and upload the PPK file to the given field. Now, hit the Open button. This will give you access to your EC2 virtual cloud server through PuTTY.
The next parts are tricky. You just accessed your literally empty cloud server. So, you have to deploy the LAMP stack, which is nothing but Linux, Apache, MariaDB or MySQL and PHP.
You need to install the stack components one by one through the PuTTY so you get a platform for your web application to stay properly on the AWS server.
I believe most of those who are reading this article are non-techies, so I decided not to mess around with your brain.
The rest of the process in a nutshell: To install the LAMP stack, you need to know how the LAMP deployment works and how to do it. It’s not simple, though; programmers use different LAMP stack command code for different Operating Systems; if it’s Linux, you must be one among those Linux wizards to find your way around.
You need to install the LAMP first successfully, and only then can you install the WordPress application with command codes similar to those you used in installing the LAMP stack.
It’s obvious now, hosting your WordPress blog on AWS using Cloudways is easy and time-saving, while it is the other way without Cloudways. Cloudways has literally automated every heavy lifting, unlike that of AWS.
Specifically, in Cloudways, the LAMP stack we were talking about would be already running once your blog is created on the hosting service provider. You can manage them, Apache, MySQL, New Relic, Nginx, Memcached and Varnish from the Manage Service menu you see below the Manage Application menu.
You can monitor your server performance and application performance anytime through the “Monitoring” tab. Your data would be backed up at a regular frequency, or you can do it manually. You can add an SSL certificate or control SSH, PHP FPM and Varnish settings right from the Application Management menu. Moreover, the whole platform is affordable and transparent as exactly as an emerging blogger wants.