Using Amazon S3 Bucket to offload site images

A bucket with stuff in it

Offloading the entire uploads directory into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket helps to speed up a site and can also be essential if you have an especially large uploads folder which is preventing other processes from completing – for example: spinning up a staging environment. Benefits Saves money on hosting all the …

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What is an Affiliate Program & How Do I Get Started?

When we first started making websites, quite a long time ago, one of the things we began doing quite early in order to make additional revenue from websites was to sign up with a few Affiliate Networks and begin promoting a number of merchants, through their affiliate programs. A number of new and existing clients …

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How do I get a UPC?

If you are in the UK and would like to trade on Amazon, you can get a UPC by registering with GS1 UK. GS1 UK will generate a number of unique product codes for you, which are then accessible by other entities, machines and devices using the GS1 database. GS1 UK will provide you with regular …

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Allow HTTPS on Amazon EC2

If you have recently setup an Amazon EC2 instance and would like to configure access to Port 443 (HTTPS:// traffic) on your new instance, there are a few things you should do. First Step – Allow Port 443 in your Security Group Firstly, you need to tell your EC2 instance that it is allowed to …

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Linux & Apache Server – Set Local Time to London, UK, Europe

A quick and simple command you might need from time-to-time if you’re running apache webservers in one or other Linux flavour. We often grab EC2 instances on Amazon, for example, for our clients and, for various reasons, we want the server to know what time it is here in the UK! So here’s the command …

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How to Make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails Work

If you’re recently installed WordPress onto a new server (we do this a lot on Amazon EC2 instances of varying sizes) and you notice that your image uploads aren’t auto-thumbnailing (when WordPress “crunches” your images into “thumbnail” “medium” and “large” sizes for use throughout your website) then chances are your server doesn’t have the GD …

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Installing APC on Amazon EC2 Instance

Some time ago, I wrote a short blog post explaining how to go about installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance to help with opcode caching. More recently, we’ve begun using APC for similar reasons, with excellent results, including on Amazon EC2 Micro instances, which can be used under their free usage tier to run …

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