How to set up a blog on custom domain for less then 2$ in 15 minutes.
Working on SEO hacks at Preply and doing much of SysOp tasks I managed to find an easiest way to set up own website quickly and almost for free. To set up personal blog you will need a domain and hosting. There are plenty of PaaS solutions to get a hosting plan for free. To name but few Heroku(best for JS), Google App Engine(best for Java or Python) or Github Static Pages(only Html+CSS). They work pretty well if you work with stack they support. If you want to have more control on what and how you deploy(like I want) you need IAAS solution. For me the best option is to use Amazon Web Services. It offers EC2 micro instance(server) and Amazon S3(disk space) and few other services for the first year for free. EC2 Micro is enough if you use some lightweighted self-hosted blogging platform. If you platform also supports caching I’m almost sure that no matter how much traffic you will have — it will not slow down, but there can be some problems if you will get RPM spikes. Usually, I start with Ubuntu 14.04 image if I want to set up stack for myself but if you set up blog it is much easier to start with some free image with all stack already installed. Amazon Marketplace has almost all popular images starting from old-good Wordpress ending with Jekyll or Ghost on free plan. I recommend Bitnami images.
To get a domain name there is a trick to get it for 1.75$. GoDaddy, domain registrar, has(as of March 2015) an AdWords campaign extension that offers 1.75$ price for the first year of .com domain. Also this promo is available on GoDaddy main page in some countries. Unfortunately, in Ukraine where I currently live, they do not show it on the main page so to use the offer just type something like “buy godaddy domian” and click on the extension link as shown below:
and you will get to some magic landing https://uk.godaddy.com/deals2/default.aspx
So, to wire up everything:
- Set up free Amazon Web Serices account(3 minutes)
- Lauch image with preinstalled blogging engine(3 minutes)
- Buy cheap Godaddy domain, and set A-record to point to your EC2 server(3)
- Set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.(6 minutes)
Originally published at https://dmytrovoloshyn.com on March 16, 2015.
