Old Stack

For FiniteHeap, I was using MyDomain for registrar services and DigitalOcean for hosting and DNS service. I used letsencrypt for SSL. I use Zoho Mail as my domain’s mail service. I used to pay $5/month for my DigitalOcean droplet and about $10/year for domain renewals. It was not a bad deal but I did not fully utilize my droplet as I intended it to. For hosting a Jekyll site, which is static, I did not need a full blown Linux VPS with SSH control. Initially I was thinking I would write some web applications and host it in the droplets but that never came so it’s time I dialed back my hosting services.

Current Stack with AWS

Few days back I switched my stack to Amazon Web Services. I transferred my domain from MyDomain to Amazon Route 53. This took less than a day even though the quoted time frame was more than a week. The transfer steps were pretty straight forward once you enter the domain name that needs to be transferred in Amazon Route 53 screens.

Once the domain was transferred, it was time to move my site and DNS records off DigitalOcean to AWS. I decided to use Amazon S3 for my static site hosting since it’s scalable, reliable and super cheap. On top of that, adding Amazon’s CDN - Cloudfront was just icing on the cake and insanely cheap as well.

There was one more reason I went with Cloudfront. Hosting your site with S3 doesn’t offer you HTTPS capability. This is where Cloudfront comes in. When setting up Cloudfront cluster for your S3 site, you can either import SSL/TLS certificates (from letsencrypt or other SSL providers) or use Amazon’s own SSL certificates for free! I just went with Amazon Certificate Manager since it was easier to provision, manage and assign them to Cloudfront clusters easily.

I followed this article from Amazon’s Docs on how to use S3 and Cloudfront to host a static site. That link is all you need. I don’t need to write them down here again.

I moved all my DNS records from DigitalOcean, including MX records for Zoho Mail, to Route 53 by using a hosted zone and also updated the nameservers for my domain to point to the hosted zone’s nameservers.

Stack Transition

Service Old New
Registrar MyDomain ($10/yr) Amazon Route 53 ($12/yr)
DNS Service DigitalOcean (free) Amazon Route 53 ($0.50/mo)
Hosting DigitalOcean ($5/mo) Amazon S3 (< $0.30/mo for my use)
CDN None Amazon Cloudfront (< $0.10/mo for my use)
Hosted Mail Zoho Mail (free) Zoho Mail (free)
SSL Letsencrypt (free) Amazon Certificate Manager (free)


Workflow

Now I have myself a world class website infrastructure for pennies.

My workflow now involves, writing posts using Jekyll, do jekyll build, push code to Github and then use AWS CLI to sync the _site Jekyll contents from my local machine to S3 using the following command.

$ aws s3 sync _site/ s3://finiteheap.com --delete --size-only

I use the --size-only attribute below to copy the files that have changed in size in _site directory instead of the default way of checking the modified dates. The problem with Jekyll is building the site deletes the _site folder and regenerates all the files in it which will have new modified date (unless you use the experimental incremental build feature) so every S3 sync would upload all the files from local machine to S3. Little undesirable for me so I went with checking for size and keeping an eye during sync’s to make sure everything that’s changed with the site gets pushed out.

I think for now I’m happy with this setup. Let’s see what my first month’s bill is going to be like.