AWS Web Hosting — Select the one that is right for you
In this article, you are going to learn the best alternative for you to build and host your website. There are at least 4 alternatives for hosting your application on AWS. There is no correct one, it depends on your final goal.
Lightsail
This is the easiest way to launch a low-cost website using AWS.
Typically the best for low to medium traffic websites with multiple authors and more frequent content changes, such as marketing websites, content websites, or blogs.
Basically, you build your website just with a few clicks, you choose the platform (Linux or Windows), SSD storage, a blueprint (a template for your website, WordPress, Joomla), etc. All that you need to have a website hosting and running.
You can easily manage your web server, DNS, and IP addresses directly from the Lightsail console.
According to the AWS, this is the best for:
- Websites built on common applications like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento;
- Websites built on popular development stacks like LAMP, LEMP, MEAN, Node.Js;
- Websites that are unlikely to scale beyond 5 servers;
- Customers who want to manage their own web server and resources;
- Customers who want one console to manage their web server, DNS, and networking.
Amplify
Provide a complete workflow for developing, deploying, and hosting static websites with a serverless backend.
Amplify is an open-source framework with some UI components, where you can easily build authentication, storage, etc., besides that it contains continuous deployment, it uses CDN by default and you can easily configure your domain with HTTPS.
Well, I would say it contains everything that you need to build an end-to-end website really fast. This is my preference for a small project 🙂.
According to the AWS, this is the best for:
- Websites built with Single page app frameworks such as React JS, Vue JS, Angular JS, and Nuxt;
- Websites built with static site generators such as Gatsby JS, React-static, Jekyll, and Hugo;
- Progressive web apps or PWAs;
- Websites that do not contain server-side scripting, like PHP or ASP.NET;
- Websites that have serverless backends.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is designed to store a simple website. You can look at this like a bucket where you put your files and then you have a URL to access it.
To use Amazon S3 as your WebHost, you need to use another service, CloudFront for caching content closer to users. Basically, you need amazon S3 + CloudFront.
According to the AWS, this is the best for:
- Websites that do not contain server-side scripting, like PHP or ASP.NET;
- Websites that change infrequently with few authors;
- Websites need to scale for occasional intervals of high traffic;
- Customers who do not want to manage infrastructure;
Here you need to do everything by yourself, continuous delivering, etc.
Amazon EC2
Suitable for Enterprise Web Hosting. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers and allows maximum scalability and availability for websites and web applications.
From all solutions here, with this you have more work, this is basically a web server, where you need to do everything from yourself, load balancing, put your application in containers, etc. Of course, AWS already gives you services for all of this, but you need to connect, configure, etc. This is for enterprise websites, where you want to have high control over your resources.
According to the AWS, this is the best for:
- Websites that use multiple web servers across at least two data centers;
- Websites that need to scale using load balancing, autoscaling, or external databases;
- Websites that require sustained high CPU utilization;
- Customers who need maximum control and flexibility for their web server configuration and administration.
Conclusion
From all options, I will resume it for you:
- Lightsail: If you want to build something like a Self-Hosted WordPress;
- Amplify: If you want to build a website fast, without worrying too much about infrastructure, authentication, etc, using react, Angular…
- Amazon S3: If you have already and website done, ready to be published;
- Amazon EC2: Enterprise application.
