Can phpBB be hosted on Amazon AWS / EC2 / CloudFront?

[Swanny]

Amazon has serious computing power and you can buy instances/servers from there. I took an initial look at it but it looks extremely complicated to set things up to host a website. It's not even clear if I can setup a MySQL database.

Is it possible to setup phpBB on the Amazon AWS infrastructure? I don't see how.

[Lumpy Burgertushie]

why would you want to? there are thousands of hosting companies out there that are as good or better and much easier to use and maybe even much cheaper.

just get a normal web hosting account and install phpbb like normal and you won't be sorry.

http://webhostingtalk.com

you will find many reviews etc. there.


robert

[EA117]

Is it possible to setup phpBB on the Amazon AWS infrastructure? I don't see how.

I recall seeing a post related to someone doing that here. I'm not an AWS or Google Compute Engine user, but I had been looking at the Bitnami virtual machine images as a way to run a local copy of phpBB for upgrade/testing purposes. (As an alternative to "Knowledge Base - Installing and Setting Up Your Own Web Server".)

In my "outside looking in" opinion, the reason to use one of these computing platforms is because you intend to scale. They are not "just another hosting provider choice for setting up your phpBB, like One or BlueHost." Choosing to use a cloud platform is more akin to "I've rented a virtual dedicated server", meaning a "bare virtual machine" for which you'll be micro-billed for CPU, storage and bandwidth. Getting it into shape to have the services to support phpBB, and all future maintenance of those services, is now "your problem." But a problem you're willing to take on when your goal is to potentially scale up to a dozen instances all running your service.

If you just have "a phpBB site", and your needs for "scale" would likely be satisfied by simply moving to a higher CPU/memory/bandwidth option of a single server, there seem to be a lot of advantages to just using a "traditional" hosting service. Which is already thinking about and maintaining the platform services needed to support phpBB for all of their customers, and is not "your problem" to have to keep thinking about.

Using a cloud platform is probably even how some of these "traditional hosting services" provide their services. Because they do intend to be constantly managing the "nuts and bolts", and intend to scale up or scale down as needed for the number of customers they are providing hosting services for. But for a single site that could be satisfied by a single server, I'm not sure it makes sense. I'm not sure the micro-billing for CPU and bandwidth would even come out cheaper, or would just have you constantly chasing "what's using CPU on my server now?"

But I am very "fire and forget" mindset when setting up hosting service. I've got other things to worry about. Maybe someone actually using AWS or Google can provide the counter argument insight for all of us to consider.

[battye]

It's definitely possible, as EA117 said though the big benefit of a service like that is if you want to scale and have complete control over your server from the point of view of basically setting it up yourself (but without access to the physical hardware).

Here is an article which details how you can set up a LAMP stack on AWS, for example: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/late ... -LAMP.html - that is a good starting point, because then you can install phpBB.

I haven't used AWS before, but I've used Digitalocean. I feel like for a regular developer who wants a little bit more control than a regular web host provides, Digitalocean is probably a better bet. AWS feels a bit more business/enterprise level. There's a good article about it at https://hackernoon.com/aws-vs-digitaloc ... 86499a6664