Service Overview & Requirements:

AWS Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. Amazon Web Services as a Cloud services platform owns and maintains the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application.

Six Advantages and Benefits of Cloud Computing

• Trade capital expense for variable expense
• Benefit from massive economies of scale
• Stop guessing capacity
• Increase speed and agility
• Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers
• Go global in minutes

There are many advantages of using AWS for hosting your social network like Backup & Restore, Content Delivery (Amazon CDN), etc

Requirements for Service:

We will be needing below mentioned information from you, so please have them ready after purchasing this service:

• SocialEngine
  • SocialEngine License Key
  • Website URL & Website Title
  • Desired Email
  • Desired Password
• Domain registration account information (for domain mapping).
• AWS Account Login (Just do a basic signup from here: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ and provide us your account details. Our experts will do other AWS configurations for you.):
  • Email
  • Password

** This service would normally be completed within 12-24 business hours of purchase.

Service Inclusions:

AWS installation and setup service for AWS from SocialNetworking.Solutions enables you to have a high performance server setup for your SocialEngine website. This service includes:

• We will setup your Amazon EC2 instance according to SocialEngine system requirements (http://support.socialengine.com/questions/152/SocialEngine-Requirements).
• We will install SocialEngine PHP on Amazon EC2 (or we will migrate your current SE website to Amazon EC2 as per your requirement).
• We will do your Domain mapping in which we will map your SE website’s domain to your Amazon EC2 instance.
• If your current website is hosted on a Dedicated Server, then we will move it to Amazon S3 . Amazon SE is an object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It is designed to deliver durability and provides flexibility.
• When your website will be running on Amazon Web Services (AWS): in addition to the above mentioned setups for dedicated server hosting, you can ask us to have Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) . Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability, security and compatibility they need.
• So, we will do the setup and other service setup as asked by you from above services.

AWS Pricing:

AWS has a pay-as-you-go pricing which means that you only pay for the resources used by your website. You can checkout the Amazon EC2 pricing from here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ (Amazon offers a Free 1 Year Tier for hosting. You can signup for this amazing offer from here: http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .

Amazon provides an easy to use Simple Calculator using which you can easily calculate your Daily / Weekly / Monthly costs: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html. You will be amazed and glad to know that this powerful services are very economical.

You can also save money by choosing the AWS Reserved Instances (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/). In the Reserved Instances, you can reserve your AWS instance for a long term duration (1 year, 3 years, etc) by paying a fixed one-time fee and a very low monthly fee. You can easily get the pricing and your saving information by selecting the desired reserved instance in “Billing Option” while using the calculator mentioned above.

To know the AWS pricing in detail, we would recommend you to go through the “How AWS Pricing Works” Whitepaper from here: (http://bit.ly/aws-pricing). It may take you some time to go through it, but it would be worth to spend the time.

Below, we tried to provide you a Monthly Cost of some instance types of Amazon EC2 for hosting derived using the simple calculator:

If you want to checkout the monthly costs of other instance types, then please use the calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html./

Once you host your website on AWS, you will get an idea of the resources your community needs, we recommend you to consider making your instances “Reserved” to save you money.

Recommended Configuration

Amazon had recently made announced for price reductions for various AWS services (including EC2, RDS, S3 and CloudFront) which will provide you big savings. To see complete details, please visit: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/03/aws-price-reduction-42-ec2-s3-rds-elasticache-and-elastic-mapreduce.html and new prices can also be easily calculated by using the calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html.

For a medium-sized SE based communities, we would suggest the below AWS services to be used, with their respective cost estimates:

Amazon EC2:-

Configuration: Linux on t2.medium + 1 Year Partial Upfront Reserved
Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of $240

Amazon RDS:-

Configuration: db.t2.small + 1 Year Heavy Utilization Reserved
Cost Estimates Break-up: One-Time Payment of $102 + Monthly Payment of $8
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: $198

Amazon S3 Storage + Cloud Front

Cost Estimates Break-up: $3 Per Month
Total Yearly Cost Estimate: $36