Aaron Kelly's Blog

Static website hosting

You should basically be able to do it for free, or for pennies

AWS S3

I like static webpages. I also like not haing to manage the server it runs on.

Being able to serve content, or host a useful tool, and letting someone else worry about managing the servers, is pretty amazing.

One morning, I woke up early and started thinking about static website hosting, don’t ask me why. I remember seeing a tutorial somewhere that used AWS S3 buckets for hosting static website content, and public access was then granted to the bucket. Pretty cool!

I use S3 for simple website hosting, using only a minimal amount of HTLM5, CSS and JS. For something that needs more complicated integrations or a database, I’ll use another service.

How to get setup

Just follow their guide: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html

Soon you you have a bucket available to receive files, and serve them to the public.

I would recommend to setup a build pipeline that puts your files into the bucket with every new commit.

Advanced serverless static website hosting

There are already some great AWS docs on setting this up, so I don’t think I need to repeat them here. They have a great tutorial on the entire process, but I only completed this to the end of step 1, as I didn’t need to do any advanced implementation: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/build-serverless-web-app-lambda-apigateway-s3-dynamodb-cognito/

In the future, maybe I will try:

Static website projects I’ve created on AWS

I have a bunch of other pet projects that I occasionally work on from time to time:

NVIDIA GeForce Now Supported Games List

PetiteSheets

Screentime.cc

Timeliner

Digital Ocean

They offer ‘App Platform’ for automated static and dynamic webapp hosting. See DigitalOcean notes

Github pages

Gitlab pages

Netlify

See also

[[Static website generators]]