So I’m a web developer by trade, so naturally when I set up this website I wanted to do it myself nearly 100%. I’m also somewhat lazy, so I decided to cut a few corners and use a CMS (right now it’s WordPress) so I didn’t have to mess with 180 some odd pictures a page when I would post the Country Sunday photos from Pla-Mor. You see, hosting a website today is actually a lot easier than what it used to be!
Note: I did do some crazy things with my website for performance and cost reasons, and I’ll get into those in a bit.
The Domain Name Question
So, why is my website www.starkindustriesne.com and not something more like www.starkphotographyne.com? Couple of reasons: Well, I had initially wanted to put my side projects for software development here too, and still plan to do at some point, so I wanted a domain name that reflected that the focus wouldn’t just be photography. The focus ended up shifting more towards photography as I’m not too keen on doing a lot of computer programming after work because it’s what I do all day anyways.
That, and I get a kick out of people when I tell them my email address and they don’t believe me (think Iron Man). The domain name likely isn’t to change, for better or for worse.
Hosting Provider: AWS
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, and is Amazon essentially leasing out their infrastructure for an extra 10 billion bucks a year or so. It hosts Netflix, Canvas, and a large amount of other services that you use on a daily basis. You definitely don’t need all that they advertise here, and it would cost you a lot of money to use all of this stuff! We’re going to focus on Lightsail, under the Compute section along with Route 53, which allows us to have a cool domain name that totally rips off of Iron Man references (for my domain name anyways, YMMV).
While we could use EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Data Store) for hosting a WordPress website, the cost is usually a few times more than if you were to just use Lightsail which is great for low- to medium-traffic websites (like mine). You can even use it for as low as five smackaroonies a month, but due to the amount of content I post related to all the Pla-Mor photos my hosting costs are closer to 25 smackaroonies a month.
Lightsail Away!
I’m just hearing the Dawson’s Creek theme song now, and now you are too! (Aren’t I just the worst?)
Anyhow, you can see I have just one instance as it’s just a simple website without too much going on. If I were running a large business, I would have a few load balancers here too. It’s fairly easy to launch a WordPress instance, but to really manage it you do need some knowledge of Linux terminal commands. (If you want to learn about Linux, let me know and I’ll do a tutorial on working with Linux.)
Note that 44.229.149.252 in the lower right corner of my instance. That’s the public IP address of your WordPress instance, which is like a mailing address for your WordPress server! You do have to set one up in Lightsail under the Networking tab by clicking Create Static IP. A static IP will be public and non-changing, so you don’t have to continually manage your DNS records all the time (we’ll get to that later).
But having people just connect to a number just isn’t cool, and that’s where DNS and Route 53 come in!
DNS and Route 53
DNS refers to Domain Name Service, and translates our cool domain name into an IP address that your web browser can use to access your website! I have a little extra mumbo-jumbo in here due to me paying for email (so I can get that sweet custom domain name) and Office 365 needing a lot of this info for proper function. We’re going to focus on the type A records that aren’t blacked out here.
The bottom one is the most important as it serves as the definitive way for web browsers to access our website by providing the exact location our server is at on the internet. The top one (the ALIAS record) serves to redirect web traffic to the bottom one so we don’t have to have all sorts of weird Apache configurations (what WordPress runs on by default in Lightsail). If your IP address to your server changes, you do have to update these records! It’s like moving but not telling people where you moved to and wondering why no one ever comes over.
Bonus: S3 for Static Content
I’m not going to go into too much detail here as it’s something that most people won’t need to deal with, but if you have a large amount of stuff like me to deal with offloading that content to an S3 bucket can be highly beneficial in terms of cost of storage and reducing load on your main WordPress server. It does require some work to get working, and isn’t too relevant to hosting a simple website.
For me, however, it works really well so I can save money on storage ($5 for as much crud I have in there) and use that savings to have a more powerful server to handle traffic.
Michael’s Website 1.0
I used to have Drupal as my CMS for my website, but Drupal wasn’t providing the performance and simplicity I wanted so in December of 2019 I made the switch back to WordPress and I have found that WordPress works very well for what I need it to. I initially chose Drupal mostly for security reasons as WordPress was known to have issues, but if you keep your plugins to a minimum and WordPress regularly updated it’s fairly stable and secure.
Drupal is great if you need a lot of configurability and horsepower for say corporate sites with multiple users, but that can be cumbersome when just wanting a simple website that gets you what you need and I found that I didn’t need all that configurability and horsepower. It’s still a good CMS, but just wasn’t good for my needs.
Also, I was running it on EC2 and spending $80 a month for it so migrating it to Lightsail and saving $55 each month was a bonus too.
Conclusion
Setting up a website can be quite easy, and is a lot easier than it used to be with all sorts of providers to choose from! I just went a more complex route to test myself and to set up a robust and speedy website.
Do let me know in the comments what I could improve on here!
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