How I Created This Blog

In setting up this blog, my primary objective was to keep expenses at a minimum. Hence, I opted for open sources and made the most of the free tier available.

Application level

Now, when it came to the application side of things, I just wanted a simple blog platform. Something that would let me toss in posts and then magically whip up a static webpage for me to copy over to S3. The debate between Jekyll, Hugo, and Gatsby led me to Hugo, mainly due to its minimal configuration requirements and simplicity.

I did settle for a theme that’s not exactly my cup of tea. I’ll probably customise it at some point, but it gets the job done as a no-fuss platform that produces static webpages.

Infrastructure level

Behold, the infrastructure level!

Simplifying matters even further, I uploaded files to S3, configured the S3 bucket for website hosting, and at that point, I could have called it a day.

However, I wanted the site to be available on HTTPS and my own domain. This led to the purchase of a domain and the creation of a certificate in Amazon Certificate Manager. Following this, it was a smooth process— attach the certificate to CloudFront, configure CloudFront to manage SSL, and direct traffic to S3.

In terms of costs, it all boils down to the domain expense. The rest falls comfortably within the confines of the AWS free tier. Keeping it budget-friendly and efficient.

The cost summs up as the cost of the domain. The rest is within AWS free teir.