title: Amazon Linux EC2 Webserver / MYSQL Upgrade – Traffic causing error establishing a database connection
body: <p>To give you a little background, I currently have a website that allows users to upload photos.  The website was initially on a GoDaddy shared server, but recent surges in traffic have forced me to explore other options.  During peak hours, the site contains 400+ active visitors, which when combined with user uploads, forces the shared server to shut down.  </p>
  
  <p>I have a small amount of experience with setting up servers through AWS and attempted to place the website on a c1.medium instance, Amazon Linux.  The website along with the MYSQL Database is on the same instance.  While I have read that this is in general frowned upon, I have similarly read that moving the database to another instance would not significantly increase speeds.  Unfortunately, the c1.medium instance also was unable to support the traffic and I soon received an error Establishing a Database connection.  The site does load on occasion, so the problem stems from the traffic load and not an actual problem with the database.</p>
  
  <p>My question is whether the problem revolves solely around MySQL?  The database itself when backed up is around 250MB.  Is the issue caused by input / output requests to the database? I read posts with people with similar problems in which they stated that installing MySQL 5.6 solved the problem, but also have read that MySQL 5.6 is slower than MySQL 5.5, which is my current version. </p>
  
  <p>After conducting some preliminary research I started to believe that I could resolve the problem by increasing the IPOS of the EBS.  Originally I had it set the IPOS as standard, but changed it to Provisioned IOPS and 30x the size of the EBS (i.e., 60GB – 1800 IOPS).  This once again appeared to have little impact.  Do I need to upgrade my instance?  What measures should I be focused on when deciding on the instance?  It appears that the cheapest instance with high network performance and  EBS optimized would be c3.xlarge.  Suggestions? </p>