how to self host your own website on the internet - I

so you know back in the day when i was a teenager around 8 years ago i came across wix and while my peers were preparing for jee neet and all those exams i was obsessed with one thing and that was having my own site a domain with my own name that's it it was peak for me

so i started dragging and dropping stuff and built myself a website using wix the only caveat was that i had to pay annual charges to maintain it remove the wix branding and make it look legit and like the real deal i used to pay around 3 to 4k... and trust me i guess that's actually a better deal because the thing i'm about to tell you is gonna make your wallet bleed so unless you have no problem with that hop on this journey with me haha :)

also if you wanna have complete control over everything and don't wanna become a victim of vendor lock in...

tbh i'm not a teacher and nor can i write like chatgpt and give you a 10 bullet point instruction manual if that's your goal i beg you please stop reading this and go somewhere else...

i'm gonna take your time i'm gonna be slow and i'm gonna explain everything in detail and in different parts because for me it's a completely different objective

so yeah shall we begin

one straightforward thing i can definitely tell you is that i used to watch a lot of ali abdaal videos and he used to blog a lot i really liked his website design and i really wished i had the same after researching and blah blah shit i learned about ghost it's a cms which stands for content management system it was priced at $15/month but i had neither a us account nor the money :( little did i know that the best part was that it's free and open source if you self host it... ding ding :)

self hosting basically means that you'll be running the software and storing your data on your own computer or server instead of relying on someone else to manage it the good part you own everything the bad part it's a hella boring and tedious job your brain is gonna burst doing it at least mine did the first time it's not difficult it's just toooo complex

i'll make your job easy and give you a head start this feels good la lalla la

lesss gooo

go to godaddy.com and the first thing to do is get yourself a domain with your name i bought mine for 99 bucks... steal deal (^^)

now we need to set up a server basically a rented machine so that we can host our own site for that we'll take the help of aws because it gives you $200 in credits when you sign up for the first time do remember to activate a paid account don't worry you won't be charged until your credits expire

okay now this part is gold and kind of a hack to reduce the cost of running your machine choose the arm based architecture instead of x86 they're much more efficient

also i made the mistake of selecting a small instance initially just to save money but don't be greedy you need the minimum requirements or your machine will crash just like mine did when i ran out of ram after installing a bunch of things that were required

a good starting point would be a t4g.large instance and i remind you do not forget to launch the instance in the datacentre closest to your city in my case i chose mumbai instead of the default north virginia to optimize for latency got it ?

for storage 30 gb or above should be fine i guess also do open both the http and https ports okay !

after launching the instance please attach an elastic ip to it or you'll be f-ed up and end up making the same mistake of updating your ip address every single time you stop or start your instance an elastic ip makes your life much easier

then go to s3 and create a bucket we'll use this bucket to store backups of our blogs images and other data so we can retrieve them whenever we want

do not forget to give your user administrator access unless you'll be sharing it with someone else and i guess you're the only one who's gonna use it otherwise you can create an iam user and just give it s3 full access... as you wish...

now all you have to do is connect to your instance and update it as usual

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

till then byeee good night

will continue tomorrow...

it's 12:08 am right now and i gotta sleep because i need to go to the theatre at 8 in the morning just to watch the new spider man movie in 2d (◞‸◟,)

stupid specs...

i should get lasik done

see ya later :)