I decided to shutdown my very old hosting solution using WordPress to try a new technology and a different way of writing and maintaining a Website.
My idea was to lower my costs and mainly the maintenance overhead. I did some searches a while back about static websites to be hosted on Amazon S3, using one of its features, a web server.
On my search of static websites generators, I found the following tools:
- Jekyll - https://jekyllrb.com/
- Hugo - https://gohugo.io/
After comparing some of the features of both tools and reading some other websites comparing them, I decided to give a full go with Hugo.
Getting Started with Hugo
Hugo has a nice tutorial and it is straight forward to understanding its engine and how it works. It is blazing fast as well, it is unbelievable what this tool can do under the bonnet.
It is feature rich to write your own rules or to use any themes from their website.
Hugo has a Quick Start guide which is very easy to follow all the steps.
Hosting on Amazon S3
Amazon S3 has a built-in web server which can be used to host file contents, using some of other Amazon AWS products as Route 53 and CloudFront you will have a full web host solution with SSL and CDN network for just under a $1 USD (Route 53 costs - DNS) for a low usage website.
Amazon AWS has some guides to do this hosting, try this one from the FreeCodeCamp, it can be useful.
CI/CD
My next step will be to setup the CI/CD pipeline for the website deployment to make an end-to-end automation.
Let’s start writing!!!