aws website hosting essentials for real-world projects
Overview
When people say aws website hosting, they usually mean stitching managed pieces together to serve pages fast, reliably, and on a budget. A lightweight static site can live on S3, fronted by CloudFront for global caching and HTTPS via ACM, while Route 53 handles custom domains and simple DNS failover. This combo is cheap, fast, and surprisingly resilient.
Common architectures
For dynamic apps, you can start small with Lightsail or go flexible with EC2 and an Auto Scaling Group behind an Application Load Balancer. If you prefer managed deployment, Elastic Beanstalk wraps provisioning, health checks, and rolling updates. Costs stay predictable when you use S3 lifecycle rules, reserved or savings plans where appropriate, and vigilant monitoring with CloudWatch alerts.
- Portfolio site: S3 + CloudFront + Route 53 with a free certificate; deploy by syncing files.
- Blog: Static generator plus CodePipeline and CodeBuild push artifacts to S3 after each commit.
- SaaS MVP: ALB with EC2 or Fargate, RDS for data, scheduled snapshots, and staged blue or green releases.
- Hardening: WAF rules, private buckets, least-privilege IAM, log retention, and periodic restore drills.