Hosting your Website for Cheap on AWS

This is the cheaps and possibly free way of hosting your website on AWS

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. It states to have over 200 services, which include anything from web hosting to AI.

As a professional, I’ve been shocked to find services on AWS that are relatively cheap and check off boxes for me that might otherwise require buying services from other third parties.

We won’t discuss all of the services here, except those that are required to host a website for cheap.

Why AWS?

Because it’s cheap! The downside of using AWS is that it’s relatively complicated to understand. It can be intimidating to new users. Yes, it is possible to rack up a bill on there that could feed a small army, but it’s very unlikely if you know what you’re doing.

Read on and I can help you in your journey.

Website Platform

Your websites platform you choose does contribute to the cost of hosting a website. These types of platforms can be categoried into two distinct groups:

Servers

Platforms like Wordpress “require” servers because they serve “dynamic” content. These servers are virtual computers on AWS that are running 24/7 that are ready to execute server-side scripts, such as PHP ( which Wordpress is built on).

Can you run Wordpress without servers? Yes you can, but this is a beginners course!

Wordpress requires PHP and a database to run. Their are many ways to host Wordpress on AWS but you’ll typically expect to pay somewhere around $30/month. It requires some know how and experience for you to see some cost savings. Yes, you can use something like Lightsail to get that up quickly but you might notice performance issues with any serious traffic.

Serverless

As the name implies, these platform don’t require servers. This is because the content you’re trying to server will typically be static content. This means, no special comupation is required to serve it.

To be exact, everything still does run on servers. It’s just that you pay for what you use, and not hourly for the servers that need to be provisioned

And so, if you’re a small startup or wanting not to spend on hosting. This is the way to go.

The most basic way to create a website is by hand with a code editor. I’ve written an easy tutorial if you’re trying to create a fast website here

How to Host?

To do this cheap, you’ll only need to know about one service. That is AWS S3

S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

You don’t need to know everything it can do. You can skip most of the steps because we just need to be able to upload your html pages and assets.

Steps to Hosting your site on AWS

• Create an AWS Account

  Firstly you’ll want to make sure you have an AWS account. You can signup here

• Create Your Static Website

  If you’re unsure where to start, follow this link to create your first web page.

• Create you Hosting Bucket

  AWS provides some pretty solid documentation around S3, no need to write what’s all ready there under Hosting a Static Website

  Uploading your documents directly into your buckets after following those steps should results in urls that you can share with your friends and family.

Conclusion

You can expect to pay nothing for a page hosted in this manner. It might not be the greatest looking web page on the internet, but it’s a start if you’re looking to learn.

In the future I would like to introduce you to coding frameworks that make the creation of static websites easier. One of which is Astro ( the framework used to build these pages).

I hope this sets you on the right track for learning how to make your mark on the internet.