This is a log of what I had to do to figure this goofy tasks out. After the 4 hours it took me to track down the right resources, I realized that I should go to the nearest platform dev at my current company and give him a hug.
Goal – get a nice looking portfolio/blog site up and running at an economical cost
Choices
1- AWS EC2
2- AWS Lightsail
3- Private Server
4- Everything else
Wow, typing that out, I can see why cloud providers threw hundreds of dollars at Hackathon attendees like myself in their student days. We’re all (human) engineers trying to find the laziest and most efficient way to achieve a goal. Unless I wanted to brush up on GCP (ha!) or Azure (good idea probably), I’m going to go with the provider that I’ve built most upon and that’s AWS.
I like a deal and one thing I can recommend is to buy the site and SSL separate. AWS will try to force you into creating a DNS server and distribution so you can use their Amazon Certificate Manager, all of which will most likely cost you $20+ a month. That’s like 2 whole burritos.
Here is my final setup
1) AWS Lightsail instance with Bitnami WordPress
2) AWS static IP from route 53 (if someone can tell me how to do this myself that would be cool). Note you will need a standard static IPv4 address (RIP IPv6). Somehow, Windows’ 7 to 10 transition is looking pretty hot right now.
3) Namecheap site name -> Includes DNS
4) SSL certificate using bncert tool (https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/linux-lightsail-ssl-bitnami). This article was super helpful and it was one line of code after SSH onto your instance from the Lightsail console
sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-toolEt, voilà! You’re reading this and all is right with the world.
Leave a Reply