In order to create this blog I needed to go through some thinking. Where to host it, which platform to use and obviously the pricing. I knew one thing, I wanted to host it with AWS because this is my main interest in life and I choose to work in Amazon’s ecosystem for learning purposes. Maybe my short Ligthsail vs S3 vs EC2 compare will help out those wondering where to start. But there’s a couple of options for those who want to proceed with them:
- You might want to host your website on EC2 Instance, but for that you would need to spent time and energy on maintaining the Instance it self, Security Groups, networking and patching. It won’t be the cheapest option thought, according to my estimates from AWS pricing calculator an instance in eu-north-1 Region similar to the one offered in Lightsail (2 vCPUs, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB SSD) would cost you 47 USD a year or 3.9 USD a month if you choose Instance Savings Plan, all upfront and 1 year reservation.
- Second option would be hosting the static website in S3 bucket and create a CloudFront Distribution with Route 53 as hosted zone. This would be the cheapest option at least at the begining. Depending on trafic volume it would cost less then 2 USD a month, the number depends on the amount of queries to Route 53, S3 and CloudFront are realy cheap.
- Lightsail is offerd for 3.5 USD a month for a 1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk and 1 TB outbound transfer.
I was looking for an easy-to-maintain option, not needing to worry about hardware and environment, and instead focus on content and learning other services. That’s why I’ve chosen Lightsail, after a period of testing a static React app on S3. I just didn’t feel good about the security of my bucket that needed to be public in order to serve as a website hosting option. And since I’m still under the Free Tier period I got three months free which lowered the price of the first 12 months to 2,6 USD/mo.