Amazon Web Services Website Hosting Fundamentals

Overview

Topics related to setting up and managing a static website hosted by Amazon Web Services.

AWS services

• EC2 - virtual application server; server & software
• Elastic Beanstalk - Service to run web applications. Creating an Elastic Beanstalk application will create an EC2 instance. Creating an Elastic Beanstalk environment can also create an RDS instance, if a database is needed.
• RDS - Amazon Relational Database Service supports database servers
• IAM
  • manages accounts used to access the application server via ssh
  • manages roles defining credentials for software running on EC2 instances
• S3 - Service for disk space. It's necessary to create a S3 bucket for web applications in order to preserve files when Elastic Beanstalk instances are reconfigured and restarted.

Domain name registry

See Managing Elastic Beanstalk Domain Names

Security certificates

For the EC2 instance linked to the Elastic Beanstalk environment, allow HTTPS connections.

• EC2 Management Console > Instances > instance > click for details > click Security Group name
• Inbound tab > Edit button > Add Rule button
  • Type: HTTPS

TK

Pricing

There are different types of EC2 instances, at different price points. The cheapest is On Demand, which can be created and destroyed as needed. Reserved EC2 instances can be purchased for either 1 or 3 year periods at significant savings compared to On Demand instances.

A new On Demand EC2 is created when a new Elastic Beanstalk environment is created. In order to bill that EBS instance as Reserved, purchase a Reserved EC2 instance that matches both the Server Type (e.g. t2.nano, t2.micro, etc.) and the region of the EC2 instance created for the EBS. As long as there is a reserved EC2 instance that matches the instances that have been created for the EBS environments, those EC2 instances will be billed at the reserved rates.

Notes

Resources

• Hosting a Web App - Getting Started with AWS