Amazon RDS MySQL VS Hostgator MySQL server... Fight!

As a few of my high traffic sites (such as Win Now) are starting to ramp up even more stat wise I'm starting to reach the limits of my lovely shared host... so it was time to start trying alternative ways of reduce the load on the main server.

First I ofloaded all images and large script files to Amazon S3. This made a remarable difference. I'm assuming the biggest bottleneck with a shared host is the bandwidth they allocate to you.

Next step was to try running the database off Amazon RDS. Setup was painless, a few clicks later I had created my new database and then began transferring all the tables over.

Once everything was setup I changed the MySQL settings on www.winprizesnow.com to Amazon RDS... It worked remarkebly well, I couldn't really notice any lag when loading... But when I finally tested it on Pingdom I noticed a 4-5x loading difference as you can see in the screen shots below.

Note: The site is being generated off Hostgator so it was always going to outperform a remote MySQL connection. Below you will see how much by.

Amazon RDS MySQL Performance:

Hostgator MySQL performance:

Conclusion:

As you can see it wouldn't be of much benefit to run the sites database off a Amazon RDS MySQL server yet. Perhaps when my traffic really starts to get up there it could be an option as Amazon allows you to scale their service acordingly. However if you are running an Amazon EC2 server I'm certain the results would be a lot different.

Overall I couldn't actually notice any difference in loading time, this is likely due to 600kb of images and script files that also need to be downloaded so maybe it's not such a big deal after all? :)