I remember last year when Kony 2012 blew up for a couple days, they switched their site to static s3 pages to handle the traffic and collect donations. I thought it was pretty clever.
Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
11–20 of 85 posts
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#12Why not just do an origin-pull via CloudFront? No need to build a static site on S3.
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#13As someone said in the comments, just keep in mind that S3 is just for storage , not serving. You'll need something like CloudFront for that, although I don't know at which degree of activity it's going to save you money to use it. Maybe from the get-go?
As has already been mentioned, S3 can indeed serve static websites and has had this capability for at least a year now.
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#14Yeah but the big question is, how can you switch the DNS over in time when NONE of your servers can respond fast enough?
Very low DNS TTLs
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#15A drop-in solution to achieve the same is using CloudFlare as CDN for your website. CloudFlare has a configurable "Always Online" mode that is automatically triggered whenever your site is down, that shows the user an offline version of the website, together with a warning message.
Obviously, if you're using CloudFlare in the first place, chances are that you won't have too many problems with high peaks of traffic anyway. But obviously, it can still happen, depending on how high the peak is :)
https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/22050652-What-does-Al...
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#16Yeah but the big question is, how can you switch the DNS over in time when NONE of your servers can respond fast enough?
You still need to update DNS ASAP, but unless your dealing with a physical flood/fire you can often get something to respond on the old IP. So, depending on the type of failure your dealing with, often setting up a static redirect is viable for insane levels of traffic even if your hosting it off of a single underpowered CPU and limited bandwidth.
Aka the site has been running off your FIOS connection and a spare CPU the suddenly the taffic spikes 5,000% what do you do? Host a single short test only, sorry we where not ready for prime time please come again, or redirect to a nice scalable static site you can manually update with nice pictures of your total failures / requests for donations or whatever.
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#17As someone said in the comments, just keep in mind that S3 is just for storage , not serving. You'll need something like CloudFront for that, although I don't know at which degree of activity it's going to save you money to use it. Maybe from the get-go?
That's completely false. Hosting a static website on S3 is very well documented.
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#18[deleted]
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#19Not exactly drop-in. With CloudFlare you need to be careful to configure it really well in the control panel settings.
Also not always 100% compatible with all of your website's features. You may want to only use CloudFlare with your static site and turn off the proxy features for other subdomains. Ymmv.
Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
#20A drop-in solution to achieve the same is using CloudFlare as CDN for your website. CloudFlare has a configurable "Always Online" mode that is automatically triggered whenever your site is down, that shows the user an offline version of the website, together with a warning message. Obviously, if you're using CloudFlare in the first place, chances are that you won't have too many problems with high peaks of traffic an…
Not exactly drop-in. With CloudFlare you need to be careful to configure it really well in the control panel settings.
Also not always 100% compatible with all of your website's features. You may want to only use CloudFlare with your static site and turn off the proxy features for other subdomains. Ymmv.