Member-only story
How To Host Your Personal Website for Free
Through the magic of AWS S3 and Cloudflare
With the web rapidly evolving in the last five or so years, dev-op practices that used to be considered the standard are now obsolete.
To get a website online, the standard used to be to look at paid shared cPanel hosting services, such as NameCheap or GoDaddy. While shared hosting is still a valid solution for pushing your website to production, more intuitive solutions have surfaced. I’ll be explaining the approach that I took for deploying my personal website where I effectively pay $0 per month to keep my website online.
First things first — prerequisites:
You will need to have the static files (HTML/CSS/JS) to your website. This guide is only applicable to sites that utilize a static set of files.
You will also need a custom domain. Domains typically run around $15 a year on average, depending on the TLD extension you are looking at. It is definitely worth the investment for personal branding.
You will also need to have an account created on Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. If you are not familiar with either of these services, that is OK — I will be explaining each step you need to take on both platforms. Let’s get started.
