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Blog Kommentare wieder aktiv (WordPress, CloudFront & Kommentare)

Aufgrund meiner letztjährigen Umstellung dieses Blogs auf einen Amazon AWS Server mit CloudFront Distribution, funktionierte anscheinend die Kommentarfunktion nicht mehr so wie sie sollte.

Bei meinem doch schon sehr populären Betrag zum Thema Hong Kong & Demonstrationen vor ein paar Tagen, ist mir die nicht funktionierende Kommentar-Funktion aufgefallen.

Als Resultat musste ich die Konfiguration meiner CloudFront-Distribution anpassen, sodass die Kommentarfunktion wieder ordentlich läuft und durch den eigentlich vorgeschalteten Cache-Filter durchdringt. Wer auch ein derartiges Problem hat, kann ganz einfach einen neuen “Cache Behavior” für die Datei wp-comments-post.php anlegen und diesen mit folgenden Settings konfigurieren:

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Migration: WordPress + MariaDB (MySQL) + PHP + EC2 + CoudFront

I previously wrote about how and why I was migrating away from Hosteurope to Amazon AWS. The basics steps sounded very simple:

  1. Backup databases and data directories on the old server
  2. Set up the new server including all software & services needed
  3. Restore all backups to the new server
  4. Change DNS setting to apply changes to all visitors

Sounds easy, right?

Everyone who’s done that kind of thing before, knows it’s never quite that easy. Doing the first step is quite straight forward. Not a big deal. For the second step I ended up using a combination of howtos to get everything set up properly:

  1. Official AWS EC2: Linux+Apache+MySQL/MariaDB+PHP
    Tutorial: Install a LAMP Web Server on Amazon Linux 2
  2. Official AWS EC2: WordPress
    Tutorial: Hosting a WordPress Blog with Amazon Linux
  3. Working CloudFront Config for WordPress:
    Setting up WordPress behind Amazon CloudFront
  4. General WordPress on t2.nano Instance:
    How I made a tiny t2.nano EC2 instance handle thousands of monthly visitors using CloudFront

My main goal was to run the smallest instance AWS has (currently t3.nano) which costs around $3.75 per month. It turned out, MariaDB (and for that also MySQL) does not start up properly at the nano instance with just 512MB of RAM. Therefore, I had to go at minimum with the t3.micro instance.

To ensure that load spikes are being handled properly and the server will not go offline during these peak times, a content distribution network (CDN) comes in handy. The great thing about AWS is that they’ve thought of all these scenarios and of course they’ve got a CDN solution ready to deploy. It’s called CloudFront. The tricky part here is, to have CloudFront kick in at the right time, because it caches content to deliver it from its own edge locations across the globe, but at the same time WordPress generates websites dynamically. So CloudFront needs to be able to work in that environment. Setting up CloudFront properly was the part that cost most time, but it works great now.

CloudFront Network Map

I have now deployed CloudFront with multiple sites all running on the same t3.micro instance. One by one I activated for CloudFront distribution and over the past couple of days the traffic handled by CloudFront is going up continuously.

CloudFront Cache Statistics

To run massive load tests I used Apache JMeter for the first time. It’s a monster when it comes to load testing and it took me about an hour to get it running the first time. You can literally configure everything on there.

As it is when you’re setting up new things, you’ll have many “new things” you’re working with. In my case, it was the first time I used MariaDB, which is a fork from MySQL. It was also the first time I worked with php-fpm, which “is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites”.

So far I’m quite happy with the current set up. Let’s see how this performs over time. My sites are constantly under attack from bots who are trying to figure out passwords and gain access otherwise to those sites. Yet, every site and server can and will eventually go down under just enough Denial of Service attacks. At the current attack level we’re doing OK, but let’s see how long this lasts and what adjustments I’ll have to deploy.

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Migration – Bye Bye Hosteurope – Hello Amazon AWS

I recently moved this blog from one old server to a new one. This is my first blog post on this new server. Let’s hope nothing explodes.

For many years I have been a more or less happy customer of Hosteurope. It is a hosting company headquartered in Germany (with hosting sites in other European countries). Many years ago I chose to sign up with Hosteurope for one of their so called “VPS” aka Virtual Private Server. That’s basically a virtual server running on one of their larger server clusters.

About a year ago I realized that my annual bill for that Hosteurope server was about €156 per year. That’s not a huge amount, but as I’ve been involved in cloud-hosting for many of our projects, I knew there are many other options that offer a way better price / value ratio.

Being lazy as humans are, I didn’t want to migrate my server away. In fact, it would have been enough for me if Hosteurope would have lowered my service charge to the price of the currently available equivalent VPS they are selling. Over the years, hardware has gotten cheaper and so has hosting gotten cheaper. In short: Newer VPS products of Hosteurope now cost less and provide more power.

I simply love attractive cost/value ratios.

So last year I reached out to Hosteurope and asked them wether they can offer me my old VPS for the new price (~€4 less per month or so). It’s not that much of a difference, but for the principle of it: I just like to be treated fairly. They did not agree to that and simply said: “You have to stick to your old product, or you may also terminate your contract.” Last year I missed that deadline — again, that wasn’t really a priority for me — and therefore, the contract renewed for another year. This year, though, I remembered and terminated on time.

AWS has almost unlimited capabilities

For over 10 years our businesses are now customers at Amazon Web Services. We’ve been with them from almost their first service. So I’ve been working with AWS for a long long time. We even had an incident where we literally spent $4000 USD in minutes — accidentally. That can happen if you “overdo” extreme automation 🙂

However, when using AWS properly, it can be very useful and cost-efficient. Especially, when we’re talking about hosting my small blog kozen.de as well as some other sites I run on this server.

AWS has some great services I was able to use for this move. That includes their S3 Simple Storage, EC2 Elastic Cloud, CloudFront Content Delivery Network, CloudWatch Monitoring Service and many others well.

AWS’s own Amazon Linux 2 is also a great Linux distribution I’ve grown to like and I’m quite confident it keeps getting maintained for the next 10 years. The old Debian that was running on my Hosteurope server wasn’t being maintained by Hosteurope – especially as they had some funky customizations and source settings in there, which for the past years seem to not have gotten the love they deserved. Hence, I ended up with an outdated system.

I’m confident this will be better now. And besides, instead of paying €156 I’m expecting to pay at most €60 per year. That’s a fluffy 60% savings and I haven’t even factored in discounts at Reserved Instance costs.

Let’s see how this goes. For now, I’d be happy if nothing crashes in the next few days after this migration 😂

 

P.S.: Monitoring capabilities are also quite neat. I can monitor the performance at all times. Have a look:

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