May 28, 2018
When I started this website, I used a service called “sitebuilder.com”. It was a really simple WYSIWYG editor interaface and hosting service. The cost at the time was very reasonable, $60 for a two year period.
Then our 2 year plan expired and the site and domain registration costs shot way up. Way way up to almost $110/year. Then a domain registration fee of $60USD/year, which is 6x the cost that most folks pay.
As some of you may know I have a engineering background and have spent the last few years running services like sitebuilder as a DevOps Engineer. I could not justify paying that cost, so I decided that I can run all the services we need on AWS web services for a fraction of the cost, with a bit of work on my end.
I decided to use hugo to generate the static content as I had used it before. This would allow me to create some basic web content without having to handcode HTML which I am terrible at.
AWS was my obvious choice for hosting, CDN, DNS, and other services as this was my life for the past 5 years.
I purchased a new domain troylake.net, and was off…
Technical information for the site:
- Domain: troylake.net
- Content: Statically generated with hugo
- Hosting: AWS S3 storage fronted by a CloudFront CDN
- Version Control: Github
Now my estimated costs are $12/year for domain and $1.25/month for CDN/S3 storage. I also own all the content
Things to do in the future:
- Infrastructure Provisioning with Terraform