Introduction

Initially, I have been using Web Hosting Hub with wordpress installed with it to run my website. I got my domain name from OpenSRS. I am quite happy with their services and support. However, It has come to the point that I am clearly paying too much for just hosting a blog which stood at about 13 bucks a month.

This is where I chanced upon Amazon Web Services. Not being a good front-end developer, I went around in search of a template where I found Hugo, a static web builder developed with Golang. Below list the ways i went around trying to switch from web hosting hub to AWS. It was a rather fruitful experience as my overhead became less than 1 dollar a month.

Feel free to view a step by step tutorial on deploying hugo with Amazon Web Services by Ilya Bezdelev.

In a nutshell, key points that you should note involves:

  • Hugo website
    • Follow Hugo Tutorial on Creating Website here
  • example.com bucket
    • serves the website content
  • www.example.com bucket
    • redirects to example.com endpoint

  • input.example.com bucket

    • contains all hugo related files

  • Default AWS Endpoint Domain Name

    • Storage Buckets (used for containing Hugo files and serving web pages to visitors to site)
    • Lambda ( piece of code that triggers downloading of static files from hugo input to output bucket)

  • Custom Domain Name

    • CloudFront Distribution (CDN)
    • Route 53

  • Security of AWS resources will be managed by Identity & Access Management(IAM)

  • AWS CloudFront consist of CDN which helps to speed up your website by

  • Route 53 is used as a DNS Service as well as Domain Name Registration

Amazon Route 53 is an authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service. DNS is the system that translates human-readable domain names (example.com) into IP addresses (192.0.2.0). With authoritative name servers in data centers all over the world, Route 53 is reliable, scalable, and fast. TLD = Top Level Domain

With all these in hand, Begin your journey to hosting your very own blog.

Remember –> Create Hugo Website –> Create AWS Web Service –> Create S3 to store Hugo Files –> DNS with hosted zone to serve your example.com to the world.

Disclaimer: feel free to read up more about Hugo to find out about the other ways to host Hugo files. A free alternative would be netlify! PS - Web Hosting Hub Support is Excellent