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Summary

This website has had quite a journey. The initial version of this website had been hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance. I had installed a Wordpress site on a t2.micro (basically using a LAMP stack) and it worked out pretty well. However, I realized quickly that I ran into several issues:

• Wordpress often felt bloated and slow
• The t2.micro, which was the smallest EC2 at the time, was still costing me about ~$8 a month or so
• It felt like a lot of wasted resources, as I wasn't getting that many hits anyway

I then learned that you can host static websites on Amazon S3. Having a statically hosted website meant I couldn't really have a databse backend, so I couldn't have people posting comments or anything like that. I realized people never really did that anyway, so it made sense to switch. The benefits I got from switching to S3 include:

• The website loads fast and S3 by nature is highly available and infinitely scalable
• I was down to paying just several cents per month

Using an EC2 at first was a great learning experience on how I could create dynamic websites that required backend databases and making it a highly available architecture, but for the purposes of just having a small personal website, S3 works great. Would highly recommend if you do not have a heavy workload and just need a website to share information.