What is an ideal instance size on ec2 servers for a busy site, as in a portal

Question

I want to know the ideal instance site for a portal, may it be a news portal or sports portal and is there a better hosting solution than ec2 for such a site ?

Answer 1

The bandwidth costs for EC2 can get out of hand pretty quickly. So if you're expecting a lot of traffic, you might want to look at dedicated hosting solutions.

If you really want EC2, I would suggest starting off with the smallest instance and then upgrading to a higher capacity instance as required. The best part about EC2 is that you can create an image of your server and when you want to upgrade, you just launch a higher capacity instance of that image. This will minimise your downtime.

Answer 2

In general it is probably best to start with the smallest instance type (m1.small) and then move up as necessary. I think in your case, since you have a PHP app it is probably CPU and database bound, I would test c1.medium instances. The reason I think that size might be a better fit is because you get 5 vcpus versus 1 vcpu with m1.smalls. You basically get 5x the cpu power for only 2x the price (.10c vs .20c/hr). Also in my experience c1.medium performance has been a lot more consistent than m1.smalls.