14 DAY TRIAL // Hosting your own website has never been easier, or at least cheaper. There are plenty of cloud computing options out there, for even the stingiest people.
If you're an Amazon fan, or you like complicated solutions to simple problems, you'll be glad to know that it's now even easier to host static websites using AWS Simple Storage Service (S3).
It's been possible to host pages on S3 for over a year now, but Amazon is now offering some better routing options.
For example, you can now drop the 'www' part from your domain and your site will still work, a silly limitation before.
"Your website can now be accessed without specifying the 'www' in the web address. Previously, you needed to use a proxy server to redirect requests for your root domain to your Amazon S3 hosted website," Amazon explained.
"This introduced additional costs, extra work, and another potential point of failure. Now, you can take advantage of S3’s high availability and scalability for both “www” and root domain addresses," it added.
The only requirement is that you need to use Amazon's Route 53 DNS service. All you need to do is configure your DNS data and you're set. Amazon has detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to do this.
Also new is the ability to redirect requests, making it possible to change parts of your sites and not break existing links.
Obviously, you can only host static pages with S3 just HTML, CSS, images and maybe some basic JavaScript. But for many, this should be enough, they can offload the big files to S3 and only host the core site themselves.
If you're looking for an even cheaper solution, i.e. a free one, you can also host a website with Google Drive. The only downside is that you can't use your own domain.