A few months ago, I covered how to setup a blog using S3, Cloudfront and Route 53 that was dirt cheap, reliable, and fast. Today, I’m going to walk through an even simpler and cheaper setup that is just as fast

Overview

Hugo is (still) our foundation. Hugo generates a static site based on Markdown based posts. Getting started with Hugo is a breeze – it’s not as complicated as Jekyll or Octopress. Comments for each post are taken care of using Disqus.

Because Hugo is is a GoLang based binary, there is a single binary for each platform it runs on (including Windows). No complicated installs – just download and run.

Storage on Amazon S3

Now that you have a set of static html pages that represent your blog – where to put them? For that, we’ll use Amazon’s S3 storage service. First, sign up and create an S3 bucket on AWS.

S3 Bucket setup

Setting up an Amazon S3 bucket is fairly straightforward, but there are some important things to remember:

  1. Your bucket name should match your website name. (For this site, my bucket name is www.danesparza.net)
  2. When setting up your bucket, under ‘Static website hosting’ make sure it’s marked to ’enable website hosting’ and set your index document to index.html

After the bucket is setup and you have transferred your Hugo ‘public’ directory content to it, you should be able to navigate to it using an AWS assigned url like http://www.danesparza.net.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com (in the case of this blog).

Protip: Automatic refresh and deploy

You can automate the deployment of your Hugo blog to S3. I use the free S3 tool to automate this in a batch file.

Protip: Store locally in Dropbox

For extra awesome, store your entire blog (content/design/published site) in a Dropbox folder. Dropbox automatically keeps track of your past file versions – so you can roll back to a previous version of a blog post in a pinch.

Lightning fast

In order to make the static content even faster, we can automatically distribute it on a CDN. Since the entire blog is just static content at this point, it makes sense that it can be cached at several locations around the globe. To make DNS and CDN distribution super simple, setup an account on Cloudflare. Cloudflare will provide you with free tools to manage your domain’s DNS information, protect you from hacker attacks and automatically distribute your content on their content distribution network.

To setup your site in Cloudflare, simply create a CNAME record for your site that points www.yourdomain.com to your AWS assigned S3 bucket url.

For this site, that means creating a CNAME that points www to www.danesparza.net.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Fewer security problems than Wordpress

Think about what we’ve setup now. Unless an attacker steals your S3 credentials, the site that has been setup doesn’t have any server side attack vectors because it’s all static HTML. There is nothing executing on the server side. There is nothing to exploit. This is much more secure than Wordpress

Inexpensive

We’re using just 1 AWS service now. Each AWS service requires that you pay for usage. So how much money are we talking about?

S3 pricing: Currently $.005 per 1000 requests + storage costs

Depending on the size of your site, you’re most likely talking less than $.25/month for all of this.

I call that inexpensive.