How To Create A Website On Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services offers cloud web hosting solutions that provide businesses, non-profits, and governmental organizations with low-cost ways to deliver their websites and web applications. Whether you're looking for a marketing, rich-media, or ecommerce website, AWS offers a wide-range of website hosting options, and we'll help you select the one that is right for you.

Broad platform support

With AWS, you can use whatever CMS you like, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more. AWS also supports and provides SDKs for popular platforms like Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and .Net.

Datacenters worldwide

Your customers can be anywhere in the world. With AWS you can have a datacenter or CDN hosting your website in any geography you choose with just a few mouse clicks.

Scalable from day one

Website traffic can fluctuate a lot. From quiet times in the middle of the night, to campaign driven, social media sharing traffic spikes, AWS infrastructure that can grow and shrink to meet your needs.

Flexible pricing models

AWS only charges you for the resources you use, with no up-front costs or long-term contracts. AWS has web hosting options that offer pay-as-you-go pricing or fixed monthly pricing.

Simple websites typically consist of a single web server which runs either a Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress, an eCommerce application, such as Magento, or a development stack, like LAMP. The software makes it easy to build, update, manage, and serve the content of your website.

Simple websites are best for low to medium trafficked sites with multiple authors and more frequent content changes, such as marketing websites, content websites or blogs. They provide a simple starting point for website which might grow in the future. While typically low cost, these sites require IT administration of the web server and are not built to be highly available or scalable beyond a few servers.

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

Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to launch and manage a Web server using AWS. Lightsail includes everything you need to jumpstart your Website – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP – for a low, predictable price.
You can get started using Lightsail for your website with just a few clicks. Choose the operating system or application template that's best for your website, and your virtual private server is ready in less than a minute. You can easily manage your web server, DNS, and IP addresses directly from the Lightsail console.

Try Lightsail free for 1 month

Static web apps that require only a single load in a web browser are referred to as Single page web apps. All subsequent actions by the user are made available through HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that are pre-loaded in the browser. Backend data is accessed via GraphQL or REST APIs that fetch content from a data store and update the UI without requiring a page reload.

Single page web apps offer native or desktop app-like performance. They offer all the static website benefits (low cost, high levels of reliability, no server adminstration, and scalability to handle enterprise-level traffic) with dynamic functionality and blazing fast performance.

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.

The AWS Amplify Console provides a complete workflow for developing, deploying, and hosting single page web apps or static sites with serverless backends. You can add dynamic functionality to your app with the Amplify Framework, and then deploy it to your end users instantly with the Amplify Console. The Amplify Console offers a number of features:

Continuous deployment allows you to deploy updates to your web app on every code commit.
Deploy your app to a global audience using our CDN, Amazon CloudFront.
Set up your custom domain with HTTPS automatically enabled in a single click.
Work on new features without impacting production users with feature branch deployments.

Try AWS Amplify for free

Static websites deliver HTML, JavaScript, images, video and other files to your website visitors and contain no server-side application code, like PHP or ASP.NET. They typically are used to deliver personal or marketing sites.

Static websites are very low cost, provide high-levels of reliability, require no server administration, and scale to handle enterprise-level traffic with no additional work.

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

Amazon S3 is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability and scale past trillions of objects worldwide.

To use S3 for a static website, you simply upload files to an S3 bucket and configure your S3 bucket for web hosting.

Try Amazon S3 for free

Enterprise websites include very popular marketing and media sites, as well as social, travel, and other application-heavy websites. For example, Lamborghini, Coursera, and Nordstrom use AWS to host their websites. Enterprise websites need to dynamically scale resources and be highly available to support the most demanding and highly trafficked websites.

Enterprise websites use multiple AWS services and often span multiple data centers (called Availability Zones). Enterprise websites built on AWS provide high levels of availability, scalability, and performance, but require higher amounts of management and administration than static or simple websites.

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

Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers and allows maximum scalability and availability for websites and web applications. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

To use EC2 to host your website, you will need to create and configure an EC2 instance in the AWS Management Console.

Try Amazon EC2 for free

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