A static website is one whose pages are stored on a server in the exact format that is sent to a client web browser. It is primarily coded in HTML. (For more details, you might like to take this Cloud Academy course on static website hosting.)
A dynamic website is one that changes or can be designed to be customized on the fly. Dynamic sites can be built using programming languages like PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby.
In this first post, I’ll provide an example of how to set up a very simple static website, and show how surprisingly cheap it can be to host a static website on Amazon’s S3. Part two of this blog series will focus on the more complicated, demanding (and costly) dynamic websites.
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> Cloud Academy static website example </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>Hi</H1> <P>Cloud Academy is awesome!</P> </BODY> </HTML>
{ "Statement":[{ "Sid":"PublicReadForGetBucketObjects", "Effect":"Allow", "Principal": "*", "Action":["s3:GetObject"], "Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::cloudacademyblog/*" ] } ] }
That’s it. Very simple. Very quick.
Let’s now check out our new website by going to cloudacademyblog.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
Here’s what we see:
Not the greatest website ever built but certainly up there with the cheapest. You can, of course, add new pages, links, and images, but keep in mind that you should stick to HTML – as this is a static website. If your site requires fancy PHP (a WordPress, site, for example) you’ll need to come up with another solution. Or just read part two of this post.
If you were to leave it at that and not worry about changing the domain name to something a little more user-friendly, then this site is virtually free. If you keep adding content – especially videos and image files, your costs are still going to be reasonably well contained as there are no set-up fees or commitments to begin using the service and you only pay for what you use.
Going static offers some terrific advantages:
But let’s not forget the disadvantages:
One of the best things about AWS is that you can play around as much as you want and as long as you take some reasonable precautions you can’t get yourself into too much trouble. So what are you waiting for? Grab yourself an AWS account if you haven’t already got one and build yourself a static website.
Look out for part two of this article when I will take you through the cheapest option on setting up a dynamic website on AWS.
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