Since this year (and specifically yesterday) I started working for AWS here in Berlin, I decided it might make sense to move my static blog to AWS :) And if you’re reading this, it worked!

Infrastructure

The infrastructure behind is quite standard. The blog, built with Jekyll, is stored on S3. I enabled the static website hosting feature on the bucket where I upload all the files, and then setup a CloudFront distribution that has the website URL as the origin. I also enabled HTTPS by default (so that also HTTP traffic is automatically redirected to HTTPS) and issued a SSL certificate trough ACM (the Certificate Manager by AWS). I then setup a Hosted Zone on Route53 so that users don’t need to access the distribution URL directly (to be fair I even registered the new domain vittoriomonaco.de through AWS because managing vittoriomonaco.it was a pain in the neck through Enter Srl).

That’s it. For completeness, I followed this guide that I really found helpful.

Advantages

The list of advantages is quite staggering IMHO:

• The monthly costs are close to 0. Before I paid 6€/month to have my VPS running just to host the static files. Now I basically pay 0.50$ for the Hosted Zone on Route53 and everything else (CloudFront, S3) is inside the free tier limits. That’s a 12x decrease in costs for the first year and (assuming the cost from the 13th month will be around 0.80€/month) around 7.5x decrease in costs from the second year on (without taking into consideration AWS lowering prices from time to time, especially for S3).
• I don’t have to renew the SSL certificate I issued before through Let’s Encrypt. Moreover I now have proper HTTPS traffic on both the naked domain and the www. version.
• The website is now served with low latency all over the world. Overall the performance is much higher now.

Disadvantages

The only disadvantage is that I can’t run stuff™ on the VPS anymore. Up to today, that was only the home-made finance management software I wrote in PHP five years ago as my first website with no idea what I was doing and I never updated since. Instead of that, I purchased for 4,99€ Money Pro on my iPhone (a Mac client exists too) and I only gained from that.

Moreover, I can still spin small EC2 instances to try out stuff or just abuse Lambda functions since their free tier is amazing :) So overall I count this as a win!