Website Architecture

I dislike Github Pages, while they are a great tool what I don’t like about them is the fact that it creates a centralization of many of these smaller sites into a single place where if GitHub were to die or begin to care more about the type of websites being hosted on pages, may destroy many useful sites.

That being said, I host my site on AWS because I love our cloud overlords. You will own nothing.

In reality, I built it on AWS because they provide quite good services for setting up static sites that are serverless and extremely cheap or free, I basically pay ~$2-5/mo. on this site depending on how much people look at the stuff I put out on here and really just shout into the void on here.

I may eventually move this site over to something else, either onto a VPS or even self host it myself if I find the ideao fhosting my own website particularly interesting but honestly for what it is, I think it works quite well.

However in general the architecture looks something like this:

In general, its quite simple and really just took me around 20-30 minutes while on the Acela to having a working page, originally on Pelican to generate the staic sites and push them up to AWS. I later switched from Pelican to Hugo purely because it looked like in the Static Site Generator wars that Hugo was the winner and most people just used that.

The only real annoying part was that for handling the URL rewriting as part of the pretty URLs. I didn’t want to think about this too heavily so I found Rob Kenis’ blogpost in which he did the same thing and it worked quite well.

In general, the site works quite well and I don’t really have to think about it other than check on the AWS bill throughout the month to make sure that nothing crazy is happening and I just let it vibe out.