Setting Up an HTTPS Static Site Using Amazon AWS S3 and Cloudfront

For many years I have been paying a cloud server provider to host my personal site. At some point I had a blog, but lately, with blog communities like Medium, it had been reduced to a one page index.html.

But the cost of having one cloud server, even if it’s the tiniest one, ends up costing around $15 month, which if you add up in months and years, can become a good chunk of money.

So at the beginning of this year, I decided to look at two technologies that can help me with this, cost-wise. One is a static site generator and the second is Amazon’s AWS service which allows you to host static websites with HTTPS on S3 and CloudFront.

The amazing thing about using S3 to host your site is that it costs literally a few cents per day. Here’s a chart of what I’ve paid for hosting my personal static site for half of the month of February 2016.

I will write more about static site generators in another post, but for this post, I will concentrate on how to setup Amazon AWS to host your secure static site.

Why is it important to have your own domain?

With Medium and Facebook and Wordpress and Tumblr people still think it’s not important to have your own URL and your own site. I personally think that it’s very important to brand yourself with your own URL and furthermore to have your own email address (not hotmail.com, gmail.com, etc.) and start building your mailing list. Social websites and platforms come and go, but your domain can be with you forever and you can still use the social platforms and duplicate content there, but always using your own website as the place where the post originally appeared.

Even if you’re a full time employee I think you should always think about branding yourself. You never know what will happen in the future and you’ll be in a better position if you have a loyal group of followers that know the services you provide.

Step 1: Register a Domain

The first thing you need to do is register your domain with a registrar. I won’t be guiding you on that part, but make sure you have access to the DNS setup and that you receive emails from that domain’s…