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We do most of our site work and hosting on Amazon's AWS services and successfully mounted a Backlight site a few months ago inside one of our EC2-hosted sites. However, that came with an expensive lesson; it required enabling FTP to run in the background and surprised us with almost $300/mo in fees (discovered after two months). So that's not really an option anymore.
Since Backlight behaves like a static site I'm thinking there might be a way to host our photo site using S3. SQLite doesn't require the server structure of a MySQL database site, but since the files are PHP-based I don't see an easy way to make this work and wonder if anyone has tried this with success (or found it couldn't be done).
Thanks for any insights!
m.
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Backlight sites are not static, hence the requirement for PHP. It won’t run on S3 alone.
Can you elaborate on the cost associated with FTP. Some of TTG infrastructure runs on AWS, and I’m able to access it for updates using SFTP on an EC2 server without additional cost. The machine costs something like 5-7 USD a month in total.
Depending on the volume of photos and traffic, you could get away with a ‘tiny’ or ‘small’ instance.
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Right, the EC2 instance is very inexpensive to run, even with having AWS handle load balancers and domain duties. It's adding the listener for SFTP transfer in order for Lightroom to upload to that caught us by surprise; that runs $7.20/day and took some sleuthing to figure out why.
When I have some time I'll do a test to see if there's a way to split the duties so the Backlight administration site remains in an EC2 instance, but the assets are offloaded to an S3 bucket. That way I should be able to at least upload and manage files easily using FTP tools. Worst case, I'll just offload the whole thing to a separate server that has SFTP built-in.
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Something’s not right here. Backlight uses HTTP to upload images, not sftp (or FTP). I can’t find the pricing for opening up sftp on a load balancer. Can you point me to it?
What’s your business need for a load balancer? Were you running your site across multiple instances and if so was that because of high levels of traffic or other needs?
Which version of our products were you running?
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Well, then that's where I feel doubly stupid if you're not using FTP to transfer. We haven't done that much with Backlight other than have a handful of clients make selects using the feedback plugin. In setting up and configuring the site I enabled the SFTP listener — and I'm sure with some digging I could find that again — but promptly forgot about it. Then while reviewing the monthly statement a couple of months later found my average AWS invoice had jumped from around $70/mo to $300+/mo.
We have several domains and subdomains for our client work in marketing and the easiest/cheapest scalable solution we found was to host through AWS using Route53 for domain management and SSL, and the load balancers are required for the EC2 instances (if you're using Route53) but they also help with our clients abroad.
Have been running Backlight 2.x and plan to update to 3.x when I have the time.
Last edited by mhilliard (2020-05-20 06:52:17)
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You're partly right on the need for FTP/SFTP. That's at least needed to upload the installer files, or to upload custom stylesheets or PHPlugins files. But it's not needed for the running of the site itself. The Lightroom module publishes via HTTP, and the Backlight admin uses HTTP by virtue of it being web-based. If I was in a position where I had to incur a high daily cost for FTP access, I would disable it after installing the site.
It sounds like FTPing through the load balancer was the culprit. I use AWS a lot, including running load balancers that farm out work to multiple EC2 instances. Our server admin access has always been directly to the respective EC2 instances via SSH or sftp, and not through the load balancer. That requires each EC2 instance to either have their own public IP address, or to access with local IPs on a VPN (I haven't set up that VPN but instead use a service set up by real system admins, and not myself who is more of a developer. So I don't know how viable that option is for a layman).
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