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I wish to use migrate to a Amazon's AWS EC2 instance for a basic Wordpress site running woocommerce.

However, I am torn between t2 and m3 instances: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

My question is does a basic website with low traffic for a server that barely reaches 10% CPU at peak times, actually benefit from upgrading to a better server?

From my understanding, better machines are only beneficial if you have more traffic or your server or has high CPU usage. In which case, any upgrades to the server would be negligible.

Thanks for the help!

Yahya Uddin
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Probably not. What would work better is some optimisation:

  • Get your headers in order, especially around browser caching. Note that you don't need PRAGMA and should clear it, you just need Cache-Control. Static resources to > 7 days.
  • Set up the nginx page cache. If you're using Apache it has one too. If all your users are logged in this won't help, but if even a fraction are anonymous (eg Google) then it will help. If the site changes rapidly then microcaching is still valuable.
  • Get a CDN, CloudFlare has a free tier that's effective. It's critical to have your caching headers set up correctly before using a CDN otherwise you'll get no benefit

I have an article on server tuning for Wordpress/Nginx here, but much of it will apply to other situations. The two tutorials following that are for HTTP2 and Let's Encrypt, which will make things faster, and CloudFlare setup. SF prefers resources copied into the answer, but they're just too large to copy in.

By doing everything I described my page load time for Wordpress is usually around 1.5 seconds, and that's with the server on the other side of the world from the client.

Tim
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The higher CPU and RAM resources definitely improve the processing speed of the server. If your site has more/complex SQL queries to run, which need more CPU and RAM usage, you can go with the high resources. Otherwise, additional resources will not be beneficial to you.

mohemmadAli
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