Preface:
Blogging is a passion or hobby for many of us. At the beginning, everyone get confused to choose a reasonable yet best blogging platform. We move from Blogger to Wordpress to various hosting companies to host our blog. In this article, we will see how can we get a blogging platform with minimum cost without compromising the quality of it. Thanks to Amazon Web Service who provides a hassle-free service for hosting your desired blog. For those, who are already familiar with AWS, your guess is right! Yes, I'm taking about "Amazon Lightsail". We will explore each and every possibility within Lightsail.
Target Audience:
- A blog developer who does want to care about the infrastructure deployment and setting it up.
- A common man/woman who has curiosity to learn new technology and would love to host his/her domain under his/her full control.
- A professional blogger who is familiar with SEO and would like to get a reliable blogging platform where he does not need to spend his/her day and night with support for optimizing his/her blog.
Lets' start digging "Amazon Lightsail" without wasting more time.
Process:
- Login to AWS web console.
- Search for Amazon Lightsail under compute section.
- Once you click on "Amazon Lightsail", you will land to the page as mentioned below
- Click on "Create instance" under "Instance" tab.
- Choose your desired availability zone.
Note: Availability Zone:
- Now you can select your preferred OS or you can select a package i.e. App+OS. You will get a handful amount of applications in the package. You can opt for "Wordpress", "Drupal", "Joomla", "LAMP" stack and many more. Since "Wordpress" is massively used for blogging, we will restrict our article with "Wordpress".
- Technical users - You can specify your init script and you will be able to ssh to your host. You can either specify your ssh key or may use the default one.
- Next section is important where you choose your plan. You just need to select based on your need. In cloud, we always suggest that you start from very minimum and then you scale as you move on.
- Provide a name to your instance for identifying it. You can also select the number of instance you want to launch. If you are beginner, you can leave it as it is.
- You can label your resource as tag. This is optional and can be skipped for beginners. This is useful in order to track the billing.
- Lastly, you click on "Create instance".
Now, you will see that your wordpress instance is getting created.
Once the creation is done, you will see it in "Running" state.
Click on your instance name (here WordPress-1) to get more detail about your blog. It will take you to a new page.
On the right hand side, you will find "Private IP" and "Public IP" corresponds to your blog. Please note that the public IP may get change every time you reboot it. So, it is always a good idea to associate a static IP to your blog. We will see in the following section about how can you attach a static IP.
At this point, you can browse your basic "WordPress" blog by accessing the public IP.
You take the public IP and paste in your browser and hit enter. It will take you to WordPress site like below:
Click on "Manage" on the right bottom corner. You will get the admin user name there. To identify the password, please continue reading.
You will be able to login to your blog now with the credential and able to see your known WordPress console there.
Now, let us explore each tab starting with "Connect"
The tab "Connect" holds the procedure for connecting your wordpress instance via ssh. This option can be explored more by the user who has a idea about ssh. For the beginners, please click on "Connect using ssh" option that you will take you to a new window.
You just need to type "cat bitnami_application_password" and hit "Enter". You will get a alphanumeric output that you need to store as that will be the password for your application while connecting to it.
The second tab "Storage" show you the amount of storage that is allocated for your "Wordpress" blog. By default, at lowest plan, you will get 20 Gig of storage.
The third tab "Metrics" will give you the statistics about your hosted blog. It will tell you the "Average CPU consumption", "Average Incoming Traffic", "Average Outgoing Traffic", "Status Check Failure", "Instance Check Failure" and "System Status Check Failure". Technical users will find it interesting for sure.
The next tab is "Networking". You can assign a static IP to your blog from this section. Just you need to click on "Create Static IP" and AWS will assign a static IP for your blog. You will find your firewall rules that are already set by Amazon Lightsail at the time to creating your WordPress instance. However, you can edit them based on your need. In case if your blog is sharing information with any other website, you can use load balancer. In our case, it was a single WordPress website that was initiated.
The following tab "Snapshot" is dedicated to backup your hosted blog. You can create snapshot before any major change to your blog which will give you an option to restore in case if anything goes wrong.
The tab "Tags" holds the tag that you have created at the time of creating your blog.
You will get the instance related history in the tab "History"
At any time, you can delete the created instance from "Delete" tab. You just need to click on "Delete instance".
Takeout from this article:
This article will guide you about how to create a blog in WordPress with AWS cloud.
Conclusion:
We should always think of cloud in our current scenario as it is effective and useful. I am sure that you all are aware about the benefits of cloud. But, for the sake of simplicity, I prefer to reiterate below:
- Reduced IT costs or Cost Savings
- Highly scale-able
- Security
- Flexibility
- Mobility
- Increased Collaboration
- Quality Control
- Disaster Recovery
- Loss Prevention
- Automatic Software Updates
- Competitive Edge
- Sustainability
Note: Before you play with AWS cloud, please make yourself safe by setting AWS Budget. If you are not sure about how to set that up, I suggest you to read below link:
I believe this article will help some of you to migrate your blog to more reliable infrastructure. In case if you need my input, please use contact us page to reach me.
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