Setting Up This Site: Day One

02/08/2024    

To The Cloud!

I decided to build this website on a server running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's amazing how cheaply and easily you can set up a server in the cloud, it's very different than when I built my own server at home long ago. I decided to go with AWS rather than Azure because of the free tier. Nothing fancy is needed to run this site, I don't expect a lot of traffic.

Amazon EC2 Linux

I picked Amazon EC2 Linux for a two reasons. First is that the AWS free tier virtual machines don't have enough horsepower to run Windows Server. Second is that it's the standard for Linux virtual machines running in the AWS cloud. So far I've found it works well, all the Linux skills I have from the past still apply here, and it's easy to find my way around.

Apache2 (httpd)

This website is running on Apache2, it's the standard webserver software for Linux these days. The only add-on I needed to install for Apache was mod_ssl, to allow for HTTPS:// connections to the site.

Route 53

One benefit of AWS over Azure is the Route 53 service. It's able to do DNS routing for you, as well as works as a domain registrar. My name isn't very common, and so the domain name for this site was available. Setting DNS up with Route 53 was a fairly straightforward task.

SSL/TLS

Setting up a proper SSL/TLS certificate was the one piece of the process that did give me a lot of trouble. I don't have the funds for a Certifcate Authority signed certificate, and needed something that worked for free. CertBot is very helpful for this, it can provide you a publicly signed certificate for no cost.

I got some helpful advice for getting CertBot installed on Amazon EC2 Linux from: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/754933