Contents
I have been a longterm Wordpress user and quite happy with it. But having a full-blown CMS system for a rather small blog incurred too much maintenance (Wordpress ships a lot of important security updates) and complexity (I have to maintain an own MySQL database) burden on me. Therefore I decided to give Jekyll a try to generate my blog and store it on the Amazon S3 service, host it with the Cloudfront CDN service and maintain the domain with the Amazon Route 53 service.
Cost
Before the move to Amazon Webservice I have been using Hosteurope for almost a decade. I have been quite happy with them but wanted to move over to Amazon because I am using their plattform, and I don’t need a classic PHP hosting anymore. For the pricing comparison I calculated a very optmistic (in the sense that the blog will create traffic) load on my Amazon hosting and compared that with the Hosteurope cost.
Hosteurope
For Hosteurope I have to pay the following costs for a reasonable setup to host the wordpress installation
| Position | Cost (year) |
|---|---|
| Domain | € 7.20 |
| Hosting | € 71,88 |
| Total | € 79,08 |
Amazon
for Amazon Webservices I created a price calculation. Because I am not a new customer, I will have to pay the full price of 18.14 € (incl. VAT) per year. Adding an external domain service to keep my domain registered costs me at United Domains 15 € per year, because they provide native support for external nameserver like Amazon Route 53. I end up with the following prices
| Position | Cost (year) |
|---|---|
| Domain | € 15.0 |
| Hosting | € 18.14 |
| Total | € 33.14 |
so the saving are 45.94 which does not seem a lot in total but is still only 42% of the former price.
Maintenance
For the blog itself I am using the following tools
- Jekyll as the site generator. I did quite a research and have been favoring Java static-site generators to avoid ruby problems on my machine. But I ended up with Jekyll because of the best documentation so far and th best support for themes and plugins.
- Minimal mistake theme I had a look into different themes and personally liked the minimal mistake theme most.
- S3 Wesbite I used the S3 Website plugin to upload my file
- Github I am maintaining my website on a public github fork from the minimal mistake theme repository. With that I can receive the updates done in the theme itself.
Installation
Except for the need to install rdoc before actually running the Jekyll installation described in their getting started.
gem install rdoc
Further steps
After doing the initial start I am planning to add some more plugins to the Jekyll installation to bring up feature like sitemap creation etc. So far I am pretty happy with the change and feel to have a more leightweight solution at my fingertips.