There are many options available in the market to host your website. Today, the most renowned brands are Bluehost, Godaddy and the list goes on.
However, it’s often that people neglect the fact that there is a big player who also offers a similar web hosting services. And that is, AWS.
What is AWS?
Some people may not know what AWS is, but I am sure that you know its parent company Amazon, the tech giant founded by Jeff Bezos. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services and it offers on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individual developers, government and companies worldwide.
Market share of AWS in cloud computing market (Image credit: Canalys)
As of 2021, AWS controls 31% of cloud computing global market share. That figure is higher than the 2nd and 3rd largest players, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, combined. As the largest IaaS company in the world, AWS provides broad range of services, including computing, storage, database, machine learning, queue and notification system, etc.
AWS allows its customer to provision computing capacity on demand, thereby reducing the investment expenditure on the on-premise infrastructure. Besides that, AWS has data center across the globe in every geographical location. Hence, depending on your application’s architecture design, a highly fault tolerant, high durability, high availability and scalable services can be achieved. This is also the reason why AWS is preferred by many customers like Facebook, Netflix, Twitch and many more.
Host your website with AWS
AWS offers various web hosting solution such as EC2 and Amplify Console for broad range of application. But here I would like to focus on two main solutions which is more straight forward:
- Amazon S3
- Amazon Lightsail
The question is: when to use Amazon S3 or Lightsail? The answer depends on what type of website you are trying to host.
Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3 in short, is a cloud object storage service that is highly available, durable and scalable. AWS guarantee a durability of 99.999999999% of durability, which means if you store 100,000 objects in S3, you will likely to lose only 1 object in 100,000 years.
S3 is excellent to host a simple static website. A static website typically run on HTML, CSS and Javascript with no server-side application code, such as PHP. Couple with Amazon Route 53 and CloudFront, it forms a simple yet effective architecture design that can efficiently drive traffic to your website.
Architecture design for static website hosted on Amazon S3 buckets. (Image credit: Matthew Manuel on Medium)
In this architecture design, the HTML and relevant files are stored in the S3 buckets. CloudFront is acting as the content delivery network that cache your content at the edge locations that is distributed over many geographical location. Such caching will ensure that the content can reach the audience at a lower latency. Last but not least, Route 53 is the DNS service that responsible to route the your domain name traffic over the internet to your AWS resources, which in this case the CloudFront and S3.
The cost of S3 and CloudFront is reasonably low as well. To make this option even more attractive, S3 and CloudFront is free for the first 12 months upon signing up the free-tier AWS account.
What if you want to host a website that is running on Content Management System (CMS)? Amazon Lightsail is the answer to it.
Lightsail is suitable for website that is built on CMS such as WordPress. You will get to choose the platform and app upon launching your server instance. After setting up the instance, you will get to access your WordPress website and start working on your web development.
Create an instance on Amazon Lightsail for WordPress-based website.
The price is incredibly cheap as well, starting from USD 3.50 with a good specification as compared to other market players. As of the day of writing, the first 3 months is free so you can sign up for testing.
Instance plan pricing for Amazon Lightsail.
Summary
AWS is one of the market players that offers web hosting solution. Amazon S3 and CloudFront can be used to host static website that does not run server-side application code, whereas a WordPress website can be hosted on Amazon Lightsail.
Both services are offered at a low price tag and often comes with months of free trial. In a free-tier account, you can enjoy free S3 and CloudFront service for up to 12 months. AWS also provides DNS services via Amazon Route 53, which can work alongside with S3 and Lightsail for DNS record management.
AWS web hosting capability is not limited to only S3 and CloudFront. Other AWS services such as Amazon EC2 and Amplify Console can also be used to deploy high traffic, dynamic website and a more complex web application that requires backends.