It isn’t the first unhackable site by any means and to get here I followed the advice of many who have been before me. I’ll get around to some credits another time.

This site is hosted on Amazon S3 but written in WordPress.

I wanted to host a static website  on S3 because S3 is quick and cheap. Quick is important if you don’t want to irritate your customers. Cheap is important always. One of the real benefits of embracing Cloud is that you should only pay for what you need. Static pages on S3 are also pretty secure and much more secure than native WordPress.

I chose to use WordPress because I am NOT a web designer. (I can point you in the direction of some excellent web designers if that’s what you are looking for.) As WordPress is ubiquitous and was used to build about 1/4 of all websites across the world I thought I might find plenty of good themes and lots of support. In the end I chose to use only the latest theme but published support has been very helpful.

So this is how my website works.

1. Its hosted on S3
2. I use Terraform to build an EC2 instance using a bitnami base build
3. I auto – run scripts to download a backup of my site.
4. At this point I have a running WordPress  instance that I can edit, add blogs etc. I usually compose offline in advance so that blog uploading is more of a copy and paste.
5. Then , when I am done for the day,  I use httrack to take a copy of the updated site.
6. I gzip the site
7. I use S3cmd to upload the files to S3.
8. I take a backup of the site and use S3cmd to copy that to S3 too.
9. Then (and this is the important part) I destroy the virtual machine.

To many out there this will seem crazy and I agree, it’s not a way that many will want to emulate. But my goal is not to host a website, but to be able to illustrate:

1. Good Cloud practice
2. That static sites are ideal in many circumstances
3. An entirely cattle based approach to CMS
4. … and some other things I haven’t quite got round to yet.

So whats next? Well I will be adding some more blogs about Cloud Strategy and implementation over the next few weeks. That will keep me pretty busy.

The site is a little ugly and bare so it will need some improvements.

I will also be writing a Cloud 101 so if there are references in here that don’t make sense or you are a Cloud beginner, I will have something useful here in the near future.

In the future I hope to use to Lambda collect and display comments (you will notice that at this time you can’t comment. If you want to contact me you can now leave a message on our contact page.

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