Cloud Confusing

Explaining hosting, AWS, Wordpress, static sites, and all manner of cloud solutions.

AWS static hosting

Amazon Web Services is an intimidating thing. After all, some of the largest, most active websites in the world are hosted there. But that doesn’t mean hosting a website there needs to be difficult. In fact, as AWS has matured over time and now it’s at the point where anyone with a minimum level of technical understanding can host a site using AWS.

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September 16th, 2019

Posted In: AWS

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If you are looking for an explainer on S3 redirection rules, you are going to have a tough time finding a good one. While information on redirection rules is available from all over, no one source (including Amazon) is even close to complete. Then outcomes don’t always match exceptions. Welcome to cloud confusion!

This guide should help with some of your S3 redirection questions. At the very least it’ll cover the major concepts and get you on your way to having a static web site with properly working 301s, 302s and other such options.

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September 10th, 2019

Posted In: AWS

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Amazon’s S3 is a great tool for hosting static sites for nearly free (and often times free). Setting up a website in S3 takes just a few minutes, and once it’s there it’s secure, scalable, and affordable. That said, it’s not the tool for everyone — like AWS, S3 has many quirks and it has a real learning curve. Also AWS support is far from free and if you want to do anything non-standard, like URL redirects, there can be many headaches. So here are some of the best alternatives to S3 static site hosting for every user, need, and budget.

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May 2nd, 2018

Posted In: AWS

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HTTPS on AWS

If you have followed CloudConfusing’s previous guides on hosting a website on S3 and then adding HTTPS to that site, forcing HTTPS is surprisingly easy. The whole process will take about two minutes per site and involves no risk factors, assuming your HTTPS setup is already functioning properly.

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April 28th, 2018

Posted In: AWS

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Getting to know the S3 endpoints has been one of the worst parts of S3 hosting. In fact, it’s been one of the worst parts of all of AWS since I started my cloud hosting journey years ago. Understanding the Amazon Web Services S3 Website and REST API endpoints has been endlessly confusing and has caused me hours of frustration. Now I have somewhat of handle on it and would like to relay my distilled learnings.

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December 24th, 2017

Posted In: AWS

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In my previous article about hosting a static website on S3, I realize that I may have rushed past the section on DNS. The AWS Static Site Quickstart tool does most of what you need, but upon further review, I can say that it doesn’t do everything and it doesn’t do DNS particularly well. So let’s revisit Route 53 and run through some of what I’ve managed to piece together.

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December 18th, 2017

Posted In: AWS

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So you setup build a static website hosted on Amazon S3 and you gave it a custom domain name. What’s next? HTTPS of course! Here’s a guide on how to do it in about 5 minutes. AWS makes SSL both free and easy, but it can be a little confusing the first time around.

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December 7th, 2017

Posted In: AWS

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Welcome to CloudConfusing.com. This is going to be a diary, a manual, an explainer, a tutorial… and hopefully so much more. At the barebones level, it’s one product manager’s quest to cloud self-sufficiency.

After years of disliking and, admittedly, fearing the world of hosting and network operations, I’ve gotten frustrated with “cheap WordPress hosting”, overpriced static sites services, hard-to-use PaaS solutions, and all the rest. So I’ve taken it upon myself to become an Ops journeyman and start handling all my own hosting work. I’ll start with Amazon Web Services and go from there.

The site will inevitably be a journal of my wins, losses, and frustrations along the way, but — more than that — I’d like it to be a manual for how others can succeed in their own cloud computing endeavors.

My underlying theory (or at least my hope) is that the cloud is easier to manage than we might expect, and it’s getting easier every day. Also that these are actually useful skills and the being able to build something on the open web is valuable and will continue to be valuable, if not in practice than at least from an academic standpoint, for the foreseeable future. Barring that, all this is interesting and probably an OK use of time.

Wish me luck!

December 5th, 2017

Posted In: Meta

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