Digital publishers often face the challenge of balancing increased website traffic and revenue growth with rising AWS infrastructure costs. To maintain a profitable equilibrium between pageviews, revenue, and AWS expenses, it is crucial to adopt effective cost management practices. This article outlines the major causes of high infrastructure costs and offers practical solutions for digital publishers to optimize their AWS expenditure.
Bots Management: Bots can significantly impact both website performance and infrastructure costs. While blocking them entirely is impractical, managing them efficiently is essential. Consider the following strategies:
a) Implement strict caching policies for URLs that require infrequent updates.
b) Employ rate-limiting techniques to control excessive bot requests.
c) Block public APIs for platforms like WordPress to mitigate unnecessary queries.
d) Filter out low-rated bots to reduce their impact on the infrastructure.
Image Storage and Access: Publishers frequently handle a vast collection of images, which, if not managed and served properly, can lead to increased storage and data transfer costs. Optimize image-related expenses with these steps:
a) Offload images to an AWS S3 Bucket, which offers cost-effective storage.
b) Utilize CloudFront to deliver images from the S3 bucket, minimizing data transfer costs and improving image loading speed.
c) Move infrequently-accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers.
Instance configuration and sizing: Overprovisioning instances (EC2 and RDS) is a common practice driven by unpredictable traffic patterns. However, it significantly impacts monthly costs. Consider the following alternatives:
a) Deploy smaller instances and leverage AWS autoscaling to handle traffic surges efficiently.
b) Leverage AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations to scale down underutilized instances.
c) Identify idle or underutilized EC2 instances using AWS Cost Explorer's resource optimizer.
d) Terminate instances that are not in use rather than merely stopping them.
e) Delete unattached EBS volumes to avoid unnecessary charges.
f) Avoid the use of multi-AZ deployment for development RDS instances.
g) Consider updating instances to newer generations and utilizing reserved instances when appropriate.
h) Utilize AWS budgets and set up alerts to monitor expenses and receive notifications when budgets are exceeded.
Digital publishers, especially those operating in emerging markets, face unique challenges that contribute to high AWS infrastructure costs.
By effectively addressing issues such as bots, image storage, instance configurations, and resource optimization, publishers can achieve significant cost savings. Additionally, staying vigilant, utilizing AWS tools, and adopting best practices will help maintain a profitable balance between pageviews, revenue, and AWS expenditure.