Hosting Primarily on Amazonaws.com? (11)

I was looking at a competitor of mines landing page, and I ended up finding that his main tracking url and his landing page are both hosted on servers named : 1.compute.amazonaws.com

Now as far as I know amazonaws is a cdn service, so how could he host an entire tracking platform, i believe it was cpvlab that he used on a cdn? Am i missing something? I find his lander a lot more professional so I think hes doing something a bit better than me but im trying to replicate his hosting and system but I dont understand how both can be hosted on 1.compute.amazonaws.com...


Thanks!

http://www.labnol.org/internet/web-h...azon-s3/18742/

Sounds like he's probably hosting with Amazon's EC2 - it's their cloud computing service.

I wouldn't recommend following his example unless you have a lot of money to throw at their higher-end offerings - the base EC2 VPSes are pretty terrible for I/O, which is key for tracking.

If he's got a lot of money to throw around he might be using something like Redshift, but even so I suspect there are more economical ways to achieve the same goal.

If you tune EC2 servers they can handle huge volume quite well.

There was a thread on the forums from kalel where he hired a russian sys admin to tweak his amazon server and nearly doubled the ROI.

Interesting! What EC2 server was that based on? I know their high-I/O offerings are very good, it's just the smaller EC2 instances that aren't so hot.

The managed Tracking202 ClickServer service is on AWS using EC2, RDS, ELB etc. Hint: Use Provisioned IOPS (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what...or-amazon-ebs/) It's not cheap, but it pays off when you are dealing with millions of clicks a day.

Like bbrock32 said, a tuned server can make a huge difference. I've been tweaking my setup over the past year.

You can get more power/performance for the same price if you go with a dedicated server, however the flexibility plusand ability to scale on demand is why I'm still on AWS.

For example, when one of my servers fails I don't even bother trying to fix it since I have fully configured images (AMI) that can be up and running in mins. So I just dump that server and load a new one. I can do this because at any point in time I have 2-3 ClickServers running behind a load balancer.

You can also purchase just the right amount of servers for your current load and autoscale when server load goes up.

Another plus is the ability to geographically place servers everywhere and using latency based routing to serve redirects from the nearest servers. A lot of you use CDNs but that only works for static files (js,css,images,video) this is good for landing page stuff.

If you want really fast redirects, you need to have your tracking server close to your traffic/clicks. It gets a little complex since the database lookup becomes the bottleneck because it's hosted in a central location and pulling data and writing data to it is slow. With fancy caching, message queues and workers that problem can be solved.

Hopefully this has been helpful and points you in the right direction

Originally Posted by Mr Baffoe

The managed Tracking202 ClickServer service is on AWS using EC2, RDS, ELB etc. Hint: Use Provisioned IOPS (http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what...or-amazon-ebs/) It's not cheap, but it pays off when you are dealing with millions of clicks a day.

Like bbrock32 said, a tuned server can make a huge difference. I've been tweaking my setup over the past year.

You can get more power/performance for the same price if you go with a dedicated server, however the flexibility plusand ability to scale on demand is why I'm still on AWS.

For example, when one of my servers fails I don't even bother trying to fix it since I have fully configured images (AMI) that can be up and running in mins. So I just dump that server and load a new one. I can do this because at any point in time I have 2-3 ClickServers running behind a load balancer.

You can also purchase just the right amount of servers for your current load and autoscale when server load goes up.

Another plus is the ability to geographically place servers everywhere and using latency based routing to serve redirects from the nearest servers. A lot of you use CDNs but that only works for static files (js,css,images,video) this is good for landing page stuff.

If you want really fast redirects, you need to have your tracking server close to your traffic/clicks. It gets a little complex since the database lookup becomes the bottleneck because it's hosted in a central location and pulling data and writing data to it is slow. With fancy caching, message queues and workers that problem can be solved.

Hopefully this has been helpful and points you in the right direction

Originally Posted by JasperP

How do you track the performance of your servers or if you need to add more server instances?

Looks like a crazy setup and definitely something good to have for international campaigns too

That's amazon BeanStalk "php" deployment setup on Amazon AWS.

Fascinating stuff, thanks!

I'd heard the higher-end Amazon data services are pretty damn kick-ass. Nice to get some confirmation on that - I've not had a chance to use them myself.

All the rest of your points - yeah, this is totally why I'd love to run tracking on AWS. The flexibility, the geolocation... Pity it's only their high-end stuff that has high enough performance.

Originally Posted by caurmen

Fascinating stuff, thanks!

I'd heard the higher-end Amazon data services are pretty damn kick-ass. Nice to get some confirmation on that - I've not had a chance to use them myself.

All the rest of your points - yeah, this is totally why I'd love to run tracking on AWS. The flexibility, the geolocation... Pity it's only their high-end stuff that has high enough performance.