In many cases much of your resource use comes from serving files on your WordPress site. An easy and cheap way to lower resource use is to use Amazon S3 Storage For Your WordPress Site. This is quite easy and actually free for 1 year if you stay within the free tiers limitations. First we need to make an account so go sign-up for Amazon S3 here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Once done go ahead and sign-in and navigate to Storage And Content Delivery > S3 > Create A Bucket. You will need to name your bucket a unique name using alphanumeric characters and no spaces. We named ours storage.kickassd.com. Also select the location closest to where your WordPress site is physically hosted.
Now go ahead and install the “Amazon Web Services” plugin, once that is done access the plugin and you will see we need to provide some access keys. In order to do this we need to create a user for the bucket and give that user permissions. To do this do the following:
- Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home#users
- Create New User
- Show User Credentials (record the keys)
- Add the keys to wp-config as outlined in the plugin settings
define( 'DBI_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID', '********************' );
define( 'DBI_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY', '****************************************' );
Replace * with your keys.
Now we need to give the user some permissions, a clean organized way to do this is to first create a custom group, call it something you recognize and than give it Administrator permissions. After that add the user you created to this new custom group.
Now if you navigate back to the Amazon plugin in your WordPress Dashboard you will see the option to install WP Offload Lite, go ahead and install this. In your sidebar now you will see you have AWS > S3 And Cloudfront. Open that and browse existing buckets > select the bucket you created. To test this go ahead and upload something to the media library and check the url to it. You will notice the url now leads to amazon!
That’s it you are now using Amazon S3 for all content uploaded from this point forward. If you want to transfer all content that is already in your media library this requires and upgrade to the pro version. To see how to further boost performance using Amazons Cloudfront please see this post: Amazon S3 Cloudfront For Your WordPress Site
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