Amazon Web Service Micro Instance - Server Crash

Question

I am currently using an AWS micro instance as a web server for a website that allows users to upload photos. Two questions:

1) When looking at my CloudWatch metrics, I h

Answer 1

If you want to stay in the free tier of AWS (micro instance), you should off load as much as possible away from your EC2 instance.

I would suggest you to upload the images directly to S3 instead of going through your web server (see some example for it here: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1434).

S3 can also be used to serve most of your web pages (images, js, css...), instead of your weak web server. You can also add these files in S3 as origin to Amazon CloudFront (CDN) distribution to improve your application performance.

Another service that can help you in off loading the work is SQS (Simple Queue Service). Instead of working with online requests from users, you can send some requests (upload done, for example) as a message to SQS and have your reader process these messages on its own pace. This is good way to handel momentary load cause by several users working simultaneously with your service.

Another service is DynamoDB (managed NoSQL DB service). You can put on dynamoDB most of your current MySQL data and queries. Amazon DynamoDB also has a free tier that you can enjoy.

With the combination of the above, you can have your micro instance handling the few remaining dynamic pages until you need to scale your service with your growing success.