Amazon Web Services gives small and mid-sized businesses access to the same infrastructure that powers some of the largest sites on the internet — but only if it’s set up correctly. At Vandulo, we handle the AWS side of hosting so you don’t have to become a cloud engineer just to keep your website online.
What We Set Up
When we move a client onto AWS, the goal is a hosting environment that’s fast, secure, and easy to maintain — not an over-engineered setup that’s hard to manage. Depending on the site, that typically includes:
- Compute: A properly sized EC2 instance or AWS Lightsail server, configured for your traffic level instead of a one-size-fits-all shared hosting plan.
- Storage and delivery: Amazon S3 for media and backups, paired with CloudFront so images and static assets load quickly for visitors anywhere.
- Database: A managed database (Amazon RDS) when a site needs more reliability and easier backups than a self-managed database.
- Security: Locked-down security groups, SSL certificates, and firewall rules so only the traffic that should reach your server does.
- Monitoring and backups: Automated backups and uptime monitoring, so problems get caught before visitors notice them.
Why AWS Instead of Standard Hosting
Shared hosting is fine for a small brochure site, but it starts to show its limits once a site gets real traffic, runs a store, or needs to scale for a marketing push. AWS lets us scale resources up when you need them and back down when you don’t, without migrating your site to a new host every time your business grows.
Migration Without the Downtime
If you’re already live somewhere else, we handle the migration: setting up the new AWS environment, testing it against your existing site, and cutting over DNS during low-traffic hours so visitors don’t notice the switch.
Ongoing Management
Once your site is on AWS, we keep it there — patching the server, watching for security issues, keeping backups current, and adjusting resources if traffic changes. That’s the part that’s easy to skip and expensive to ignore.
The Bottom Line
AWS is powerful, but it’s not something most businesses want to manage themselves. Vandulo handles the setup, security, and maintenance so you get the reliability of enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure without needing an in-house engineer. Get in touch if you want to know whether moving your site to AWS makes sense for you.
Common AWS Hosting Mistakes We Fix
AWS gives you enormous flexibility, and that flexibility makes it easy to set things up in ways that are slow, insecure, or expensive. These are the issues we see most often when we take over an AWS account:
- Using the root account for daily work. The root user has unlimited access. It should be locked down with multi-factor authentication and rarely used, with day-to-day access handled through individual IAM users or roles.
- Security groups open to the world. Ports for SSH, databases, or admin panels left open to any IP address invite automated attacks. Access should be limited to what’s actually needed.
- No tested backups. Snapshots that were never configured, or backups that have never been restored, provide false confidence.
- Oversized or undersized servers. Paying for far more capacity than a site needs wastes money, while an undersized instance makes the site slow during busy periods.
- No monitoring or billing alerts. Without CloudWatch alarms and budget alerts, problems and surprise charges go unnoticed until they become serious.
- Unpatched software. A cloud server still runs an operating system, web server, and PHP or Node.js versions that need regular updates.
- Everything on one instance with no recovery plan. For important sites, a plan for restoring quickly after a failure is essential.
Keeping AWS Costs Predictable
One of the biggest worries business owners have about AWS is unpredictable billing. Cloud pricing is usage-based, which is efficient but can surprise you without guardrails. We keep costs under control by right-sizing instances based on real usage data, setting AWS Budgets alerts, moving media to lower-cost storage tiers, using a CDN to reduce server load and data transfer, cleaning up unused snapshots, volumes, and IP addresses, and, for stable long-term workloads, considering Savings Plans or reserved capacity. For many small business sites, Lightsail’s bundled pricing offers a simple, predictable monthly cost while still running on AWS infrastructure.
Security Best Practices on AWS
AWS operates on a shared responsibility model: Amazon secures the underlying infrastructure, while you are responsible for securing what you run on it. Our standard security setup includes multi-factor authentication on all accounts, least-privilege IAM permissions, restricted security groups, encrypted storage and backups, SSL/TLS certificates with automatic renewal, a web application firewall where appropriate, regular operating system and software patching, and logging so activity can be reviewed. On the website itself, we add hardening, malware scanning, and login protection. Learn more about our website security services.
Performance Tuning for Faster Pages
Moving to AWS doesn’t automatically make a site fast. Performance comes from configuration. We tune the web server, enable server-side caching (such as object caching with Redis and PHP OPcache for WordPress sites), compress and optimize images, serve static assets through CloudFront, and use modern protocols like HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 where supported. These improvements reduce server response time and help Core Web Vitals, which supports both user experience and search rankings. See our guide on website speed and Core Web Vitals for more.
Backups and Disaster Recovery
A good backup strategy follows a simple principle: keep multiple copies, in more than one place, and test that you can restore them. On AWS, we combine automated server snapshots with separate backups of files and databases stored in Amazon S3, with retention periods that let us roll back to a recent point. For business-critical sites, we document a recovery plan with target recovery times, so if something goes wrong, the path back online is clear and fast.
Is AWS Right for Every Website?
Not always. A very small brochure site with little traffic may be perfectly served by good managed hosting at lower cost. AWS makes the most sense for sites with growing traffic, eCommerce stores, real estate sites with large IDX databases, custom web applications, and businesses that need more control, security, or scalability. We’ll give you an honest recommendation based on your needs, not on what’s most profitable for us.
AWS Migration Checklist
- Inventory the current site: files, databases, email, DNS records, SSL, cron jobs, and integrations.
- Choose the right AWS services and instance size based on traffic and requirements.
- Build and secure the new environment before moving anything.
- Copy the site and database, then test thoroughly on a temporary address.
- Lower DNS TTL values ahead of the switch to speed up propagation.
- Schedule the cutover at a low-traffic time and run a final data sync.
- Switch DNS, verify SSL, forms, email delivery, and analytics.
- Monitor performance and errors closely for the first several days.
Choosing the Right AWS Setup for Your Website
AWS offers hundreds of services, and most websites need only a handful of them. Picking the right combination is what keeps a site fast without paying for capacity it never uses. Here’s how we typically match the setup to the site:
- Brochure and small business sites: A single right-sized EC2 instance or Lightsail server, with a content delivery network in front of it and automated snapshots, is usually all that’s needed. It’s simple, inexpensive, and far more reliable than crowded shared hosting.
- Busy WordPress and WooCommerce sites: Moving the database to Amazon RDS, offloading media to S3, and caching pages through CloudFront keeps the site responsive during traffic spikes and sales.
- Web applications and high-traffic platforms: Load balancers, auto scaling groups, and multiple availability zones let the application add capacity automatically and stay online even if one server or data center has a problem.
We document the architecture we build so you always know what you’re paying for and why. As your traffic grows, the setup can grow with it, one piece at a time, instead of forcing a full migration to a bigger plan.
Frequently Asked Questions About AWS Hosting
What’s the difference between EC2 and Lightsail?
Lightsail bundles a virtual server, storage, and data transfer into a simple monthly price, which suits many small business websites. EC2 offers far more instance types and configuration options, which suits larger sites and applications that need flexibility or integration with other AWS services.
Will AWS make my website faster?
It can, when configured properly with the right instance size, caching, and a content delivery network. A poorly configured AWS server can be just as slow as cheap shared hosting.
Do I need a developer to manage AWS?
Running AWS safely requires technical knowledge of servers, networking, and security. Many businesses choose managed hosting so experts handle setup, updates, monitoring, and backups.
Can WordPress run well on AWS?
Yes. WordPress runs very well on AWS with proper server tuning, caching, and a CDN, and benefits from AWS’s reliability and backup options.
What happens if traffic suddenly spikes?
AWS lets you scale resources up quickly, and with the right architecture, automatically. A CDN also absorbs much of the load from images and static files.
If you’d rather not handle any of this yourself, our AWS hosting and cloud infrastructure team manages the entire process, and our maintenance plans keep your site secure and updated afterward. Call or text (347) 470-7724 to talk about moving your website to AWS.