Start with the website and the people responsible for it. AWS gives you infrastructure options, but the right setup depends on how the site works, the demands on it and the support arrangements you need.
Describe the workload before choosing a server.
A business information site and a busy membership website do different work. Monthly visitor numbers alone do not describe that difference. Logged-in activity, searches, purchases and background tasks can matter just as much.
List the actions that are important to the business and when demand is highest. For an existing website, use measurements from the current setup instead of choosing a server purely from its advertised specifications.
Treat the server and disk as separate decisions.
AWS burstable instances are designed around baseline CPU capacity and the ability to burst. They can be appropriate for some workloads; the question is whether that behavior matches your site. A compute-optimized instance is not automatically the right choice for everyone.
Storage needs its own review. EBS gp3 lets storage performance be configured separately from capacity. The right choices depend on what the database and application need, rather than a rule that the biggest disk or server must be best.
Ask who looks after the setup.
These are part of the hosting decision. A capable environment can still become difficult to run if the responsibilities are left unclear.
- Who updates WordPress, plugins and the operating system?
- Who checks alerts and responds to a problem?
- What is backed up, where is the copy kept and has recovery been tested?
- Who controls the AWS account, domain and billing?
Ask for the design and its limits in plain English.
You should be able to understand the purpose of each main service in the proposal. A load balancer, for example, can route traffic, but one placed in front of a single application server does not remove that server as a possible point of failure.
For Knowness, we reviewed an existing AWS setup before redesigning it for the membership website. Your project may need a different approach. A useful proposal explains both the reason for the design and the trade-offs.