Cloud Confusing
Explaining hosting, AWS, Wordpress, static sites, and all manner of cloud solutions.
How to 301 Redirect a Domain With AWS S3
Properly redirecting is something that is easy to say (or request in a ticket) but not always easy to do. It just so happens that its really important for proper site behavior, particularly if you are concerned with SEO.
Here’s how you 301 redirect a site with AWS S3 in the simplest manner possible.
Sal January 19th, 2020
Posted In: AWS
Upgrading Your Lightsail Instance
Upgrading a Lightsail instance is an incredibly easy procedure. If you have been thinking about it and don’t mind the expect expense associated with a more powerful virtual server, than I’d recommend making the plunge. A little extra CPU power, possibly an extra core, and more memory can really brute force some slowness.
Sal November 22nd, 2019
Posted In: AWS
Tags: Lightsail
How To Host a Static Web Site on AWS S3 For Almost Free
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.
Sal September 16th, 2019
Posted In: AWS
Tags: Amazon S3, AWS, Hosting, Route 53, Static Website
An Abbreviated Guide to S3 Redirection Rules
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.
Sal September 10th, 2019
Posted In: AWS
Tags: Hosting, Redirection Rules, Routing, S3
How to Restore Your Original Amazon Route 53 Name Servers
This won’t be an interesting topic for most people, but it will sure come in handy for a few of you! So you have a website setup on Route 53 and at some point in the past you pointed the name servers off to whatever your hosting solution was at the time. Now you want to do something else with that domain (maybe build a static site on S3) and you need your original Route 53 name servers back. But… what are they?
Sal July 24th, 2019
Posted In: AWS
Tags: Name Servers, Route 53
How to Schedule Cloudwatch Events
Ever wonder: when does AWS CloudWatch run rate events? I had this same question when I started using CloudWatch as a trigger for the Lambda job that backups my Lightsail instances.
Basically I had created a few events an told them to run once a day. That’s great, but when would that be? Rate events are not like cron events where you set a time and they run at (or very close to) when you specify. After all, you are simply saying “run once a day” not “run exactly at 01:14 UTC every day.”
Sal June 10th, 2019
Posted In: AWS
Tags: CloudWatch
How to Setup Automated Lightsail Backups
Note: In the summer of 2019 AWS finally released built-in daily snapshots for Lightsail. The only option for this is one snapshot a day, with a maximum of 7 snapshots stored. So if you have very basic needs the below producure with be overkill for you, but if you want hourly backups, monthly backups, more than 7 backups, etc. feel free to use this method.
Amazon’s Lightsail is a great option if you want affordable hosting and the power of a virtual private server (VPS), but the lack of cost means a lack of convenient features. One of the most glaring of these missing features if Lightsail’s complete lack of automated backups. This is a glaring oversight for Lightsail and it’s especially odd given that Lightsail has a built in — and very easy to use — snapshot tool.
Lightsail snapshots are one-click backups of your entire instance, which are better than simple backups, but there is no way to automate them through the Lightsail UI.
Using Amazon Web Service’s API and AWS Lambda you can automate Lightsail snapshots without much difficulty. In fact, thanks to a good web Samaritan the code is already done, so you just need to do the setup on your AWS account.
Sal May 16th, 2019
Posted In: AWS
How to Use AWS Lightsail with Route 53 DNS
Amazon’s Lightsail is affordable and easy-to-use, but it comes with some serious limitations. Hidden away in the middle of an FAQ page Amazon notes that Lightsail accounts are limited to:
- 20 Lightsail instances
- 5 static IPs
- 3 DNS zones
- 20 TB of attached block storage
- 5 load balancers
Which one of these is probably going to be the most immediate problem? That’s right, the 3 DNS Zones. Don’t worry, this is easy to fix.
Sal April 18th, 2019
Posted In: AWS
Free AWS? What is AWS Free Tier and What are the Limitations?
Yes, Amazon Web Services has a free tier. This free (as in beer) stack is a 12-month program that gives developers who are new to AWS a powerful set of tools, though one that comes with some limitations. It can be seen as a gift from the massive AWS cloud or as a gateway to AWS lock-in, but either way it’s worth checking out.
Sal October 21st, 2018
Posted In: AWS
How To Easily Add Email To Your Domain
It’s 2018. We live in a world where email is supposedly being replaced by Slack, Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and about 100 other services. That said, email is still mission critical for almost every company and if you have a business application with its own domain you almost certainly need an email address associated with it.
It turns out that setting up email for your domain is still a bit of a pain. Here’s the easiest way to handle custom domain emails.
Sal October 11th, 2018
Posted In: AWS, Google Cloud Platform
Tags: Email, MX Records, WorkMail