Amazon Web Hosting is a great way to get started with web hosting. It’s affordable, and it offers a wide range of services. But there are a few things you need to consider before getting started. For example, do you want unlimited storage or do you want some limits set up? Do you want to use an Amazon Web Hosting Contract or an hourly rate? And finally, is your business ready for the big leagues? If all those answers are yes and no, then read on!
Amazon Aws for Web Hosting
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.
Why use AWS for web hosting?
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.
What are the features of web hosting?
Most web hosting companies provide different hosting packages and plans. Your monthly web hosting cost can range from free to paid, depending on factors such as the following:
- Size of your website.
- Number of daily website visitors.
- Peak time website or webpage traffic.
- Web hosting features that you require.
Before selecting a web hosting service, explore the different features that various services provide. The following are the main features generally provided.
Disk space
Your website will require storage space for emails, web files, images, and databases. While you are estimating your storage requirements, also consider future website growth and website traffic. Low disk space impacts user experience, so it is an important factor in the selection of a web hosting service.
Bandwidth and data transfer
In the web hosting industry, the terms bandwidth and data transfer are often used interchangeably. However, they are two different things. Bandwidth is the amount of data that your website can transfer to visitors at one time. Data transfer is the actual amount of data that it transfers.
You can think of bandwidth as a pipe. The bigger the pipe, the more the water can pass through it. However, for various reasons, you might not use the total capacity of the pipe. Data transfer is like the actual amount of water that goes through the pipe in a given time period.
Email accounts
Many web hosting plans include an email account. You can link your email address to your website name. For example, if your website name is example.com, your email address will be yourname@example.com. The following are the main types of email accounts.
POP3
POP3 accounts give you server space to store your emails, which you can access directly or by using your email client program.
Forwarding mail
Forwarding mail accounts redirect emails to another email address. This account could be a personal email account with an email service provider or a third-party account that manages your website emails for you.
Aliases
Some web hosts have emails plans that you can use to create several aliases or email account names without creating a full POP3 account. For example, you might want to display sales@, support@, and orders@ addresses on different pages of you website. Instead of having multiple POP3 accounts that need to be checked and administered, you could redirect everything to a single inbox.
FTP access
FTP refers to website file transfer and sharing. Many websites have documents, such as PDF files or image files, that they want internet users to download. The web hosting company uses FTP access to provide this service.
AWS Website Solutions
Simple Website Hosting
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
Use Amazon Lightsail
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.
Single Page Web App Hosting
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.
Use AWS Amplify Console
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.
Simple Static Website Hosting
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
Use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3):
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.
Enterprise Web Hosting
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
Use Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2)
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.
Aws Web Hosting Pricing
The total cost of hosting your personal website on AWS will vary depending on your usage. Typically, it will cost $1-3/month if you are outside the AWS Free Tier limits. If you are eligible for AWS Free Tier and within the limits, hosting your personal website will cost around $0.50/month.
Amazon Lightsail pricing
With Amazon Lightsail, you pay a low, predictable price. Lightsail bundles resources like memory, vCPU, and solid-state drive (SSD) storage into one plan, so budgeting is easy and straightforward. All Lightsail plans include static IP addresses, domain name system (DNS) management, one-click secure shell protocol (SSH) terminal access (Linux/Unix), one-click RDP access (Windows), highly available SSD storage, and server monitoring. All of Lightsail’s features—from free tier options to those with more compute—are offered in bundled plans.
No-nonsense monthly pricing
Focus on your code, not your bill. Lightsail bundles all the resources you need into a single, simple price.
Get started with Lightsail for free
Included in all Lightsail plans
- Static IP address
- Intuitive management console
- DNS management
- one-click SSH terminal access (Linux/Unix)
- one-click RDP access (Windows)
- Powerful API
- Highly available SSD storage
- Server monitoring
AWS Free Tier
As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with Amazon Lightsail for free. Sign up and receive one year free of 50 GB content delivery network (CDN) distributions, one year free of a 5 GB object storage bundle, and three months free on select container, instance, and database bundles. If you are linked to an organization (under AWS Organizations), only one account within the organization can benefit from the Free Tier offers. Check out the AWS Free Tier FAQs to learn more.
For a limited time, Lightsail is extending its free tier to include three months free on select bundles. The offer applies to new or existing AWS accounts that started Lightsail usage on or after 7/8/2021. Offer only applies to one bundle per account. Standard charges apply after first 750 hours of usage of the selected bundle each month. Check out the following offers and save now on Amazon Lightsail.
Three months free on Linux/Unix bundles: $3.50 USD/month, $5 USD/month, and $10 USD/month
Three months free on Windows bundles: $8 USD /month, $12 USD/month, and $20 USD/month
Three months free on the $15 USD/month Database bundle
Three months free on the $10 USD/month Container service (Micro -1 node)
12 months on CDN
AWS Amplify pricing
Amplify Framework
When you use the Amplify Framework (Libraries, CLI, UI Components), you pay only for the underlying AWS services you use. There are no additional charges for using the Amplify Framework.
Static Web Hosting
AWS Amplify Console is priced for two features ‒ build & deploy, and hosting. For the build & deploy feature the price per build minute is $0.01. For the hosting feature the price per GB served is $0.15 and price per GB stored is $0.023.
With the AWS Free Usage Tier, you can get started for free. Upon sign up, new AWS customers receive 1,000 build minutes per month for the build and deploy feature, and 15 GB served per month and 5 GB data storage per month **for the hosting feature.
Static Web Hosting – Free Tier
Build & Deploy
1000 build minutes per month
HOSTING
5 GB stored per month
15 GB served per month
The free tier expires at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term.
Static Web Hosting – Pay as you go
Build & Deploy
$0.01 per build minute
HOSTING
$0.023 per GB stored per month
$0.15 per GB served
Multiple sites per project, public SSL certificates included at no extra cost
Pricing examples (outside free tier)
- Example 1A startup team with 5 developers have an app that has 300 daily active users. The team commits code 2 times per day.Monthly build & deploy charges
- Assumptions: Average build time = 3 mins; Number of work days/month = 20
- Total build time per month = num of devs * num of commits/day * num of days * avg. build time = 5*2*20*3 = 600 build mins per month
- Monthly build & deploy charges = 600*.01 = $6Monthly hosting charges
- Assumptions: Web app size = 25 MB, average size of page requested = 1.5 MB
- Monthly GB served = Daily active users * average page size * days = 300 * (1.5/1024) * 30 = 13.18 GB
- Monthly GB stored = web app size * number of monthly builds = (25/1024)*(5*2*20) = 4.88 GB
- Monthly hosting charges = 13.18*$0.15 + 4.88*$0.023= $1.97 + $0.11 = $2.08Total monthly charges
Total charges = Build & deploy charges + Hosting charges = $6+$2.08 = $8.08 per month
- Example 2A web app has 10,000 daily active users and is updated 2 times per monthMonthly build & deploy charges
- Assumptions: Average build time = 3 mins
- Total build time per month = num of updates/month * avg. build time = 2*3 = 6 build mins per month
- Monthly build & deploy charges = 6*.01 = $0.06Monthly hosting charges
- Assumptions: Web app size = 100 MB, average size of page requested = 1.5 MB
- Monthly GB served = Daily active users * average page size * days = 10,000 * (1.5/1024) * 30 = 439.45 GB
- Monthly GB stored = web app size * number of monthly builds = (100/1024)*2 = 0.19 GB
- Monthly hosting charges = 439.45*$0.15 + 0.19*$0.023= $65.92Total monthly charges
Total charges = Build & deploy charges + Hosting charges = $0.06+$65.92 = $65.98 per month
How do you pay for AWS?
Pay-as-you-go
Pay-as-you-go allows you to easily adapt to changing business needs without overcommitting budgets and improving your responsiveness to changes. With a pay-as-you-go model, you can adapt your business depending on need and not on forecasts, reducing the risk of overprovisioning or missing capacity.
Save when you commit
For AWS Compute and AWS Machine Learning, Savings Plans offer savings over On-Demand in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount (measured in $/hour) of an AWS service or a category of services, for a one- or three-year period.
Pay less by using more
With AWS, you can get volume based discounts and realize important savings as your usage increases. For services such as S3, pricing is tiered, meaning the more you use, the less you pay per GB. AWS also gives you options to acquire services that help you address your business needs.
Conclusion
Amazon Web Hosting is a great way to get started with online marketing. By choosing the right Amazon Web Hosting plan and having a long-term investment strategy, you can make sure that your business is well-positioned for success in the years to come. Additionally, being up-to-date on financial news and preparing for volatility are important factors in any business endeavor. Overall, if you’re looking to start or grow your business online, Amazon Web Hosting is an excellent option.