Websites are important for any business. Gone are the days where you need a computer and dial up connection for getting connected to the Internet and browse the ever expanding catalog of all websites/pages/resources that are spread across the globe. Internet, being global and is available in most of our hands today. Thanks to the global network connectivity and mobile computing that made this possible.
People across the globe are searching for services and products online. The ratio of people searching for products and services online to people searching physically is growing exponentially on a daily basis.
Every business needs a website for online presence and everyone is looking to have a website either to create a profile for themselves or write a blog on their area of interest. You can use profile services such as Facebook or blogging services such as Blogger but remember you are hosting your data in 3rd party servers and you have less administration capability at infrastructure level.
If you are a geek and you want to host your own data, you got to sign up for following services and be prepared to spend a few bucks for the luxury of hosting your data yourself. Sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), a Domain Name System (DNS) provider like dnsmadeeasy, optionally you can also sign up for cloud flare for securing your website.
S3(Simple Storage Service) hosting will cost you less than $1 a month provided you are not driving too much traffic and not hosting a size heavy website. Pls refer to AWS pricing (is there an online lookup site we can link to) for more details. If you are very specific about the cost factor, go to AWS billing and set up a notification trigger that will send you a notification when you cross a threshold (may be > $1 in this case) so you know when you hit your budget limits.
The bucket name should be same as your URL. For example if your website URL is going to be www.thisismysite.com then your bucket name will be www.thisismysite.com
This is the Amazon S3-provided website endpoint for your bucket. You will use this endpoint in the following steps to test your website.
{
"Version":"2012-10-17",
"Statement":[{
"Sid":"PublicReadForGetBucketObjects",
"Effect":"Allow",
"Principal": "*",
"Action":["s3:GetObject"],
"Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::www.thisismysite.com/*"
]
}
]
}
All these steps should be followed before you upload the index.html to your bucket or create other subfolders in your bucket. The reason for that is to ensure that all your permissions are synchronized to the index.html and other sub folders under the bucket.