Save 60% on server costs with this setup
Use Varnish to speed up your high traffic website and to save more than 60% on your server
Context
Some friends of mine have created a network of websites on different topics which are visited by 5 million people monthly on average.
Everything was working fine but the server setup they had resulted in 2 issues. One was that it was not scalable. And the second issue was a bit more serious because the server provider decided out of the blue to close the account because of an allegedly terms infringement by the websites.
What we understood later is that the fixed payment (of 30€/year) was not covering the server costs at Aruba that had to work continuously for 4–5M hits a month.
After this I offered to find a suitable substitute for the server and moved it twice to some shared VPS instances and in the end decided to go with AWS or Azure. Because of issues with AWS to set up a EC2 instance near the region of my interest I chose Azure in the end.
To have the websites up and running as soon as possible I created an old-fashioned web server with Ubuntu, added certbot, php, nginx and what not and created the virtual hosts. At the same time I migrated the Wordpress instances to this new…
