I have decided to migrate my static webpage from Bluehost to AWS S3

bluehost

Back in 2017 : I decided to take a leap of faith to be a freelance web developer.

Prior to that, i only had one experience which was my Final Year Project where my group and i built an inventory system for a car workshop to keep track of their stock inventory. As that was an in-house project, everything was deployed on their local server. I had 0 knowledge on deploying a website using WWW.

So, to start my journey as a web developer — I needed a hosting web server. Bluehost seemed to be the easiest and fastest way to get my product out without needing to know much about servers and everything and it has 30 day money back guarantee, so why not right? 😄 I bought the 3 years Prime Web Hosting if you’re wondering.

Prime Web Hosting : from 2017–08–03 to 2020–08–03 |$5.4/month

Following that, to deploy my website there were two options:

1. Upload files via their CPanel file management
2. Upload Files to Bluehost with FTP Client

For a beginner like me this is really easy! Bluehost has a focused hosting service for Wordpress which makes it super easy to get started as well. Theres only one downside to it which was its speed. Because I’m from Singapore and Bluehost’s server is in the US. It takes a damn long time to load a simple static page which is frustrating. 🙄😡

So do take note that the place of hosting makes an impact to the speed of the site.

Oh and not to forget database — its easy to setup as well, jus a few clicks in Cpanel and all is good!

Bluehost is definitely a good choice for beginner like me back then when the only downside would be the speed.

Lately, my Bluehost web hosting plan has expired and i still have a few websites being hosting there, so i have decided to cut Bluehost out of my life because one, it’s

1. Expensive ( I cant pay as i go, I have to choose a plan upfront and abide to it )
2. It’s terribly slow.
3. Lastly, it’s not highly available — my website was down a few time for no apparent reason.

aws

So now i have decided to migrate everything over to AWS including my domain. Heres why i decided to migrate my static site to AWS S3.

1. No extra cost

S3 is fully responsible for serving your content to the visitors. It completely remove the need of purchasing hosting servers or launching virtual machines and managing them.

2. Automatic scaling

Without making any changes to your initial setup AWS S3 will automatically scale up the infrastructure to meet the growing demand.

3. High Availability

Amazon guarantees 99.99% availability of S3 which means there is almost no chance of losing your data.

4. Negligible costs

Hosting your small to medium sized static website would cost you few dollars monthly as it goes by a pay-as-you-go approach. Mine cost me less than a dollar a month. 😄

Using AWS Calculator, you can easily calculate the monthly bill for hosting your static website on S3 and Route53. You can also add details of your CloudFront setup if you are planning to use it.

Bonus — if you have globally distributed audience, CloudFront can help you deliver the contents in a very efficient manner. It is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that securely delivers frequently requested content to 100 edge locations across the globe and by doing this, it achieve low latency and high transfer speed for end users. It always provide protection again DoS attacks.

The only downside i would say is the initial setup (route 53 & cloud front) but well after we get pass that everything will be good as S3 is really simple to use. 🥳

Thank you for reading!!