Back in November 2018, the database on my WordPress installation for abdullahirfan.com crashed for some reason. I tried a simple mysql service restart on the centos VM but had no luck. At that time I was too busy with a client’s project and couldn’t spare time to look into the issue so my site remained down for about 2 or 3 days until the workload decreased, that’s when I decided:

• WordPress was an overkill for my site (which contains only static pages)
• I did not want to be managing my own server for a low traffic personal site

I started looking into static site generators and discovered Hugo, I loved it because of it’s terribly simple single binary setup; just place your markdown files, run a simple ./hugo command and Viola! your static site is ready. Also, being a programmer writing blog posts in Markdown feels….so natural.

For hosting I decided to use AWS S3 and Cloudfront. My reasons for this were:

• I no longer had to manage my server
• I got a cheap CDN in the form of Cloudfront
• The overall setup wasn’t very expensive, like previously I was paying $5/month for my VPS, right now with the new setup I’m at $0.3/month.

Costs of hosting a low traffic static Hugo Site on AWS S3 and Cloud front:

Here is my site’s usage data for January :

Here is my site’s bill for January, it’s $0.09: