Hosting a Dynamic Website on AWS

A Dynamic Website is the most widely used type of website used by businesses and organizations to interact with the customers. A dynamic website uses server-side processing and technologies such as PHP, Java, or .NET to build web pages that are customized as per the visitor requests. You can use any of the CMS (Content Management System ) such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal to create a dynamic website.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers cloud website hosting solutions that provides businesses, non-profits, and governmental organizations with a flexible, highly scalable, and low-cost way to deliver their websites and web applications.

Dynamic Website Architecture on AWS

Typically hosting a dynamic website on AWS involves a three tier architecture:

• Web Browser: It presents the user interface for the customers to interact with the organization.
• Application Tier: It represents the application server which handles the functionalities of the website apps.
• Database Tier: It represents the storage or database server, which is responsible for storing your website content.

The following steps have to be completed, before you can deploy your dynamic website:

• Creating the application server – Amazon EC2 is used to create a virtual server to run your website. You have to specify the security groups which controls access to the EC2 instances. Plus, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, allows you to effectively manage the various credentials of the software running in the EC2 instance. Lastly launch your EC2 instance from the Amazon EC2 console.

• Creating the Database server – You must specify the security groups which allows your application server to access your database server, before launching a DB instance.

• Deploying the website app – Typically deploying your web app involves connecting to your Linux/Windows instance, configure the EC2 Instance, starting the web server, installing the App, testing the Website and create a Custom AMI (for disaster recovery scenarios).

• Auto scaling and Load balancing your website – Both these activities occur simultaneously depending on the web traffic to your website. You can configure Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing for your EC2 instances.

• Depending on the scaling policies that you create, you can use Auto Scaling feature of AWS to launch or terminate EC2 instances automatically based on the needs of your application.

• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is designed to help you improve the availability and scalability of your application. It distributes traffic among multiple virtual servers or EC2 instances as the capacity requirements changes over time.

• Associate a Domain Name with your Website – The customers can access your website by using the registered domain name. The Amazon Route 53 service is a highly available and scalable DNS web service, which will direct your customers to the website.

• Clean Up– This is required to prevent unnecessary charges which you might incur.

Alternatively, you can bypass all these above steps and use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service, which will automate the app or website deployment. You only have to publish your code (written in PHP, Node.js or Ruby and other languages) and the AWS will take care of the rest. You don’t have to worry of creating a virtual server or EC2 instances. It is all set up in the background by the AWS.

You can capitalize on Sysfore’s expertise in hosting a Dynamic website on the AWS. Please write to us on info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.