My company is about to conduct a big project which involves a flash games website. This website is targeted to the US, meaning it will serve a lot of concurrent users. We bought many flash games and the website is about to be finished, so we must find a hosting company right away.
The website consists of 10 static pages, 140KB each (design+images+CSS).
JavaScript is being delivered via Google CDN (jQuery, SWFObject) to save bandwidth.
We have 20 SWF games, each weights around 500KB to 6MB top.
I’m planning to use dynamic compressions and basically any possible method to save bandwidth and resources, but nevertheless I must get a large hosting for possible growing in the future.
SQL is nothing special: DB size will be 150MB top and all tables are indexed using fulltext catalogs and non-clustered indexes.
After doing some research, I’ve found that big websites are using Amazon’s EC2. I tried to contact Amazon but they’re weren’t really helpful. All I got is the following URL.
I would like you to help me choose the right Amazon instances. We are talking about Windows 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
If your pages are static you should consider hosting them on S3 instead of EC2. See their blog for details http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-amazon-s3.html.
With S3, you can GZip your content which all modern browsers support. You do have to add the GZip header when uploading to S3. (BTW, this will also allow you to use Cloudfront as a CDN for faster delivery).
Regarding the servers, based on your description a standard small instance should be fine. Small has 1.7 GB of RAM which should be plenty. Is your server hosting the DB and the web app? If so you might need to go with a large instance which includes the SQL licence http://aws.amazon.com/windows/
One thing to note, once you create an instance you cannot change the instance type easily. You can only start, stop, terminate, etc.