My Best Practice for “Crowdsourcing on Cloud” by
This article was supposed to talk about my best practice for the Alibaba contest “Crowdsourcing the cloud”. Honestly, before we even do that I would like to talk about the great opportunity provided by Alibaba cloud for all the developers and the new businesses to setup and start the businesses for free. This applies for both technical and non-technical people as Alibaba is already providing a $300 credit to try the products and if you submit the plan for the “Alibaba Cloud Crowd Sourcing the cloud” you will receive a $60 credit for the span of 3 months in which you can buy different support plans. They have dedicated teams that can help you with your questions along the deployment or migration.
If you need a Alibaba Cloud Account, you can get one with free credit of $300 by registering here.
I submitted an idea for deployment of a new Website. It just took me an hour to set up my website and make it up and running. There are so many isntances I felt Alibaba cloud is doing a very good job compared to the competitors. Let me share my experience, on the way of this article you’ll understand why I say Alibaba cloud has done a very good job.
1. Buying a domain
We start and discuss the step-by-step detail of how to buy a domain on Alibaba cloud in some time, let’s discuss the benefits provided by Alibaba cloud
· You can buy a domain with your credit (I am serious :) )
· The privacy protection for your domain is free
· The Cost of .com domain is just $6.50(inclusive of all taxes)
Buying a domain is never easy if it is not on Alibaba Cloud, you need to navigate to “Domains” in console.
From there the process is pretty obvious & it is very simple.
Something about My Blog:
This is a blog where you can see basics for the new technologies provided with right & best approach, with working code snippets. Have a look in some time as we are the process of developing.
2. Buying an ECS instance
You can navigate to Alibaba Cloud console, find Elastic Compute service
Clicking on that will take you for the ECS Console which may not look something like below screenshot, click on “Instances” on left side takes you to the following screen.
Makes sure before you click the “Create Instance” you are selecting the correct “Region” you would like to deploy.
Pro Tip: The nearer the region the better.
Then you will be taken to a screen where different steps need to be performed.
1. Basic Configurations
2. Networking
3. System Configurations
4. Grouping
5. Preview
If you are just starting off with your website, let me give you some best practices which I followed
Pro Tip: Select Pay-as-you-go, in this way you can keep your server in stop state when you are still designing it and save some money
Pro Tip: Select 1 vCPU, 4GB RAM, IMO this is more than enough for a new website as this configuration handles more than 100,000 unique requests. You can anytime you want.
You should get an Internet IP for your website after your deployment, hit the IP on the server for setting up WordPress.
Additional benefits:
1. You can leverage a lot of Images available as a one click deploy solutions on the ECS Instance
2. You can also purchase a support plan to get a premium service, while the deployment.
3. Else you can contact me :P
3. Setting up WordPress
This is the most beautiful and the easiest part, I can’t share any screenshots as I have already deployed the website and went through the setup. BTW, if you see the screen to “select the language”. Congratulations !! you have successfully deployed
It will be as simple as a signup form for a website providing the user name, password & other site details, make sure you select the difficult password, as this is the most secure part of your website.
4. Integrating domain with the WordPress instance using Alibaba Cloud DNS
Alibaba cloud DNS is a state of the art product, the reason I exaggerate much about this because this is my first dedicated instance deployed, I am used to deploy my website on a shared instances where I need to bother about the traffic I receive and Limited control or restrictions posed by the hosting provider.
Alibaba cloud DNS has lot of options to offer, Again, before we discuss the technicalities Let’s talk about some benefits here.
DDoS protection:
for those of you who don’t know what is DDoS attacks, let me give a brief background
DDoS is short for Distributed Denial of Service. DDoS is a type of DOS attack where multiple compromised systems, which are often infected with a Trojan, are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
DDoS attacks service with millions of legitimate requests, so that the real traffic never get the information requested or the request is not served. making the website unavailable.
What Alibaba Cloud has Done here?
Well, Alibaba Cloud claims and I quote that
“Alibaba Cloud DNS uses built-in anti-DDoS protection to defend over 10 million domain names against DDoS attacks”
Many of you should have been thinking why should I believe this, we should not forget that Alibaba cloud powers their existing services with the very same product that selling for us, it may happen they use different configurations, lucky for us that, we can even try this configuration switch have paid using the cloud credit.
Minimum TTL:
This is a configuration, you might not see if you are using any shared web hosting before, TTL stands for time to live. this shows how much time a record or entry will be refreshed. The TTL the more dynamic it will be for the changes. it’s not always best to have the minimum but at times you need to set the TTL to minimum to get things done very easily and quick
If you try to configure the TTL value on a shared hosting provider like GoDaddy, HostGator etc.. you can’t get below a specific limit, you need to pay extra for the service. but with Alibaba cloud DNS you can go all the way to 1 second, anyways the default value is 10 minutes.
Search engine robots:
will Alibaba cloud helps you increasing the website speed and performance by routing the web crawlers to a different address or resolution name, this is not available in any other DNS provider.
This is what the documentation had to say about this service
· Index, even if your website shuts down.
· Provide an exclusive resolution address for web crawlers (web crawlers may have a certain impact on website access performance).
· Increase the speed and probability of crawlers indexing your website.
There are lot of options with the DNS service and encourage you to check out the documentation. no let me show you the basic configuration I have made for my website.
Below is my configuration for the www.codertuts.com
I will try other options during my development. Will keep you posted.
Conclusion:
Upon seeing all the benefits, I can Alibaba Cloud targeted the moon. Most of the options I see here is not available with other cloud providers. If you are planning for your business/innovative Idea. Try submitting your Idea to the Contest & All the Best.
Make sure to follow me for future updates & If this article helped you show some appreciation by clapping to my article
Sai Sarath
