January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new...
W3 Total Cache with Amazon S3 and CloudFront
A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in...
Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs
I’ve been with Amazon for quite a long time now and you must have heard that their web hosting services aren’t very cheap. The average total of one instance per month (including EBS, S3 and all the others) was around $120 at the start. That was back in July 2009 when I had no idea about how all this stuff works. With a lot of experimenting I managed to drop my instance per month costs...
Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront
So, three months later I realized I wasn’t using CloudFront at all! Huh? I took a deeper look at my Amazon Web Services bill last month and found out that I wasn’t even charged for CloudFront! But hey, I delivered all my static content through CloudFront distributions from S3 and I had a subdomain mapped to those distributions and everything was working fine (thought I).. Let’s...
WordPress: The template_redirect Hook Returns 404
This is a real quick one. I’ve started using the W3 Total Cache plugin a few days ago which I’m totally satisfied with. Unlike the WP Super Cache plugin, W3TC can keep the caches in memory via memcached, serve the static content through CDNs. The guys at W3 Edge promised to add Amazon CloudFront compatibility which I’m very excited about. As we all know (I guess) Mashable is...
Cloud Tips: Automatic Backups to S3
In a previous post about backing up EC2 MySQL to an Amazon S3 bucket we covered dumping MySQL datasets, compressing them and uploading to S3. After a few weeks test-driving the shell script, I came up with a new version that checks, fixes and optimizes all tables before generating the dump. This is pretty important as mysqldump will fail on whatever step would cause an error (data corruption...
Cloud Tips: Backing Up MySQL on Amazon EC2 to S3
Now that I’m all set up in the Amazon cloud I’m starting to think about backups. Elastic Block Storage (EBS) on Amazon is great and the Snapshots (backups) can be generated with a few clicks from the Management Console, but, for a few reasons I’d like to set up my own backup scripts and here’s why: Amazon EBS snapshots are cool, but there might be a situation where...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 Email & S3 CNAME Issues
So you moved your blog or website (or whatever) to Amazon EC2 and wondering why your e-mail notices have stopped working? Now I know there’s bunch of articles about the EC2 email issues, and most of them state that the letters are getting into the spam boxes or aren’t getting delivered at all, because Amazon’s IP pool has been blacklisted by most e-mail providers. Don’t...
Have You Tried the Amazon Web Services?
Amazon EC2, EBS, S3.. I’ve been looking for the perfect web hosting for over two years now. Is this it? A few months ago I really liked MediaTemple cause they offered pretty good US hosting starting from $20/mo, which was quite good for the Foller.me project, so at the starting point I chose them. Their service is cool, definitely worth the money, but. A few weeks have passed, along with...