It’s been more than two months since I moved my photo portfolio website and this blog to AWS. And I wanted to share my experience in running it, some statistics and, the most important, how much did I pay for it.

In this post I will describe how I configured static website hosting using Amazon S3 with custom domain, secured website using https, and also configured redirects from naked domain to www and protocol redirects from http to https.

My photo portfolio is implemented as SPA (Single Page Application) using React, so all routing is happening on the client. And it worked fine, until I did hard refresh of the page or wanted to share direct link to one of the pages (for example https://www.adragunov.com/ethiopia). In this case users saw 404 error page produced by Amazon S3 as it tried to find object with key ethiopia in the bucket, which obviously did not exist as it only existed as client route.

I’ve used GoDaddy for the hosting of my personal photo web site since 2012, and every time I logged in into the GoDaddy portal I felt lost by the amount of different ads, partner services and security packages. Also the price for the same hosting plan has raised from 80$/year to over 130$/year during past few years.