This is a quick story of how moving to IPv6 caused an odd problem where requesting one website on my server returned another website. I moved my AWS EC2 instance from public IPv4 to IPv6 address only to avoid the IPv4 charges AWS introduced in 2023. I have about six…
Protecting WordPress Websites using CloudFlare Firewall Rules
Overview This blog posts shows how the CloudFlare firewall can increase website security and reduce server resources required to run a WordPress website. Introduction I’ve recently set up a new web server for PTS, an AWS t3a.nano – a virtual server with 0.5GB of RAM and 5% of a processor…
Benchmark AWS A series AMD EPYC EC2 Instances instances : t3a / m5a vs t3/m5 vs t2
EC2 AMD Epyc vs Xeon Introduction The reservation for the t2.nano that powers this and a number of other websites finished this week. Of course I wanted to try the new t3 series EC2 instances which are meant to be both cheaper and faster than t2, and I was curious…
Protecting your Amazon Linux WordPress server using fail2ban and Cloudflare
Servers on the internet are under constant attack, usually from automated scripts trying to make use of your resources. WordPress installations are doubly attacked, because they’re often out of date and are relatively easy to take over. This article describes how to use fail2ban and Cloudflare to protect your Amazon…
Moving WordPress Between AWS Regions – EC2 and RDS
Moving WordPress Between AWS Regions – EC2 and RDS In previous articles, I’ve described how to set up WordPress in AWS using EC2 and RDS. In this article I’ll describe the steps I took to move the server between regions and get it working again – in my case from…
Fixing WordPress indexes, foreign keys and auto_increment fields
NB: this article is from 2017. While it is a useful guide, you should validate the process before using it. It may be inaccurate or incomplete as WordPress evolves. Comments in 2024 have indicated it still works, but use it at your own risk! I recently migrated a number of…
How to Migrate from RDS to MySQL on EC2
Introduction A year ago I moved all my websites to AWS using the free tier, using an EC2 t2.micro and the RDS relational database service. Now that my year of free tier is up I’d like to reduce my costs. I want to migrate from RDS to MySQL on EC2.…
Setting Up Cloudflare CDN and Caching – Part Six – Hosting WordPress on AWS Tutorial
Setting up CloudFlare Free CDN for Website Caching and Security Introduction This multi-part tutorial is a complete guide to setting up WordPress on AWS. In this part of our tutorial we’ll be Setting up CloudFlare, a CDN that will let us distribute resources from our website around the world to…
Free HTTPS and HTTP2 for WordPress using Lets Encrypt on AWS – Part Five – Hosting WordPress on AWS Tutorial
Introduction This multi-part tutorial is a complete guide to setting up WordPress on AWS. This part of our tutorial we’ll set up HTTPS and HTTP/2 using free Let’s Encrypt certificates, and update WordPress to work on the new URL. Links to other parts of our tutorial Part One, Introduction Part…
WordPress Website Optimization, Nginx Caching and DNS Changes to Go Live – Part Four – Hosting WordPress on AWS Tutorial
Introduction This multi-part tutorial is a complete guide to setting up WordPress on AWS. In this part of our tutorial we’ll set up load testing and benchmarking, we’ll optimize the content delivery, and we’ll change DNS to take the website live. Benchmarking was done with both ab (Apache Bench) and…