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How I host my personal site for ~$1USD/Month

Dakota Lewallen on May 10, 2020

KISS Before we get too deep into the details, I'd like to detail the driving principle behind being able to deploy a website for this ch...
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Chathula Sampath

You can do this without any cost by using vercel !

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DavidJames

Right, but for $1/mo you basically force yourself to learn AWS. Which is useful in a lot of other ways, you know?

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Dakota Lewallen

I think it's contextual. If you have either people that know AWS or can pay for those people, go the AWS route. If you don't, services like Vercel or digital ocean are great to get products to market. Then you can get people/money.

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Chathula Sampath

yes agree with that :D

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DavidJames

I checked Vercel and it seems like that could be useful too...

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Dakota Lewallen

If I remember correctly, Vercel is built mainly on AWS. You absolutely can get a similar result with it, but after a point they will charge you at a higher rate than if you did it yourself. I have nothing against Vercel or people using it, but being able to build from the source will always be cheaper in the long run. The cost is upfront with having to learn what I detailed in this post.

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siliconhippy • Edited

Interesting! Will be nice to have a Part II with comparisons.

So can this setup have WordPress templates with Plesk or cPanel management?

How is your $1 a month site in terms of traffic and applications, compared with an equivalent Lightsail install that looks the cheapest to me in the Big Cloud space?

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Dakota Lewallen

Lightsail is more similar to traditional hosting services, in that it is spinning up a whole network environment to host your application. The deployment I detailed above is serverless. So wordpress and tools like cPanel are out of the picture entirely. In terms of handling traffic, the metrics are different. Performance isn't limited to a single machine or location, so a lot of the normal bottle-necks that come with single-machine hosting are removed. The tradeoff is that it can handle all those requests, and AWS is more than happy to charge you for doing that. So you do have to be careful that you bundle your application fairly small, and possibly limit the geographic regions that can access your distribution.

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Shiraaz Moollatjie

You can also use a tool like Terraform to create the Cloudfront and S3 infrastructure for you. Then I think that this whole solution would be repeatable after that (with a bit of templating added)

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Dakota Lewallen

That is a great idea!! Personally I have more experience with CloudFormation than terraform, but I might have to put out a template for the project either way 🤔

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DavidJames

Simple is awesome, thanks Dakota.

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Panda Quests

With gitHub Pages, you can host your website for free.

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Rei Allen Ramos

Woah TIL about CloudFront. I thought AWS Lightsail was the cheapest option. Thanks a lot and will definitely try this in the future 🦄

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Dakota Lewallen

Lightsail with just a virtual machine is cheap. Lightsail with anything else is not, compared to rolling those services yourself. Glad to hear that you found this helpful :)