My challenge with my just revived wordpress.com site is the plug-ins. Even paied premium users cannot install plug-ins for diagram, etc. Upgrading to business plan for $33 a month is a bit luxurious for a site just for fun.
14 years ago I prototyped an intranet site in university in an all summer long project with what is referred to as WAMP stack today. It was a pain in my memory. There must be some streamlined way. Luckily in my shopping for managed service, I came across Amazon Lightsail. The annual cost to host a WordPress site would be $55 in US, given that virtually nobody visits it except myself. The cost consists of:
- Domain registration for $13 a year
- Lightsail blueprint for $3.5 a month
There are several benefit of using this Lightsail blueprint, such as:
- You can actually SSH into the EC2 instance. This is important to myself in the habit of probing into how things work;
- Resources are all packaged into a fixed price plan. Remember the pesky accidental AWS charges?
- You have the whole LAMP stack pre-installed, with the bitnami image for WordPress;
- Start small but with scalability.
To start with Lightsail is extremely intuitive. Just click and launch:
There is a good instruction here on YouTube. Once launched successfully, there are some post configurations:
- Request a static IP and assign it to the EC2 instance;
- Register a domain (within Lightsail, with Route53 or any other domain registrar) and create an A record referencing the IP address;
- Create a certificate and set up anto-renewal. Here is an instruction but the steps differ if DNS is managed outside of Lightsail;
- Redirect http to https. Refer to the instruction from bitnami;
- Export from wordpress.com and import the xml into this little site.
Notice that all services relevant to hosting are packaged into a single service called bitnami. In order to restart service, instead of restarting php, httpd and mysql individually, you can run the following:
# service bitnami stop
# service bitnami start
In fact, in /etc/rc5.d or /etc/init.d, I do not find the individual services for httpd or mysql. There is actually an instance of MySQL database in the Instance:
# mysql -u root -p
mysql > show databases;
There you go! Now the site is live. This little instruction will come in handy for rebuilding when this site is blown away 🙂
Digi Hunch