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Simple Silo
Web hosting on AWS made simple. https://simplesilo.app
This little one just set up web hosting on AWS using Simple Silo.

Web hosting on AWS made simple.

What if hosting SSL enabled websites on AWS was pain free?

So you want to host a static site on AWS huh?

You have heard the talk about it’s superior reliability, global foot print and low cost and you are sold on all the gains.

You will be right if the above statement describes what you have heard about AWS and you should be excited but there are no gains without pains. Hosting a web site on AWS involves multiple steps, is error prone and can be overwhelming especially if you are new to the plethora of services offered by amazon cloud services.

The Old Way

Traditionally, hosting a static website on AWS that was configured to take full advantage of the free SSL certificate offered by AWS involved multiple steps and made use of multiple AWS services along the way.

Here are the steps required to host a website on your own AWS account by yourself along with the AWS services used.

  • Create Route 53 hosted zone
  • Create S3 bucket
  • Configure S3 bucket for web hosting
  • Create SSL certificate for your domain name using Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM)
  • Configure DNS service to validate SSL certificate
  • Create Cloud front distribution
  • Configure Cloud Front distribution with S3 origin
  • Configure Cloud Front distribution with SSL certificate
  • Create origin access policy (OAI)
  • Update S3 bucket policy with OAI for private access from Cloud Front
  • Configure DNS service to point to distribution
  • Upload static site to S3 bucket … if you did not make any mistakes above, otherwise you must find and fix mistakes and wait 30+ mins for the changes to go live every time you make a change to your cloud front distribution.

There are a few things that make this process very painful.

  • It is error prone and errors are costly as it takes time for any update to go live, usually upwards of 30mins.
  • It is tedious. Most websites in production these days have multiple environments, where features are tested like staging or validated by a quality assurance team like QA. That means that those steps must be repeated for each and every environment required.
  • In the event that a website needs to be taken offline completely, those steps have to followed again but this time in reverse and carefully, in order to effectively stop recurring charges by AWS on rouge resources.

There must be a better way right? The complexity and effort required to setup and maintain a website on AWS is significant and can make even the most experienced web developers shy away from all those gains mentioned above.

A better way — Introducing Simple Silo

Simple Silo is makes it easy for web developers to host static web sites on their AWS infrastructure by automating AWS resource configuration and management, reducing complexity and saving you time in the process.

Web hosting on AWS using Simple Silo invloves the following steps

  • sign up and configure account with AWS
  • create a silo
  • verify silo with your domain provider to setup DNS records
  • deploy to your shiny bucket.

Simple Silo makes it easy to create multiple SSL enabled buckets on your AWS infrastructure and can even tear it down at your command with the click of a button. No need to fiddle with underlying configuration details on AWS.