The DIY Approach: How I Hosted My Website from Scratch - The Plan

I always wanted to host my own website just for kicks and giggles !! But also wanted to have total control without much investment. This was not possible with any web hosting services that are around. These services are expensive and moreover I'm in exploring mode where I want to spend as little as possible yet have a expensive professional look on the website. 

I was looking for options like - 

• If I could host the website from my own laptop or 
• If I need to have a website hosing service. 

Then the custom domain, anyway I need to purchase that. There are plenty of vendors that sell domains. Buying a domain is as simple as buying a laptop from Amazon, if you know what specifications you want. 

Coming to the first approach - If I could host the website from my own laptop, I could have done that but security of my home network and the disadvantages out numbered the advantages:-

Advantage are

• There is no cost of additional infrastructure - just my laptop and the existing network !!
• I can have total control how and when I update my site
• I could take off when I feel I need to move on to next learning curve 

then the disadvantages:-

• I need to expose my IP to public - this opens "can of worms" for my network security, this alone out numbered every advantage. 
• my laptop needs to run uninterruptedly - I doubt this is possible 
• I need to learn how to expose my IP and then to protect it which puts my present agenda off the track  

My best bet was to try out some of the cloud services, and my immediate approach was Azure which gave a $200 credit and then Google Cloud again gave a similar credit but these amounts were not sufficient to explore what I'm looking for. I was looking for a bare minimum server configuration or at least a service that lets me host my site and expose the IP to public.

AWS was my next destination. May be my exploration with Azure and Google Cloud made AWS interface more easy to navigate or it is just better user interface. Here in AWS I came across 3 wonderful services that I could choose and use for my requirement. They are :

• AWS EC2
• AWS Lightsail
• AWS Amplify

I'll talk more about these in future, but for now my quest to host my site found a solution. 

In the next blog I'll talk about the domain services I used and the reasons behind choosing it and could it have been better if I opted for a different provider. 

Stay tuned !!!