Website Startup

This is partly a vanity thing, but I do want to have a place to show my progress. There are already steps I’ve forgotten, and I want to document some of the dead ends and false starts. I’m after a basic static site - looked at Hugo and didn’t get on with it, found Zola really just works fine. I’m sure there are better options, but I really just want a vanity/blog site.

My original idea was to have a Zola published on s3 as I have an AWS account already, and I was looking at using R53 for my domain. I do AWS, it’s my job, I’m used to it - but is it the right path here?

Noted that cloudflare is cheaper for resistration and doesn’t carry the DNS hosting fee of AWS (only 60p/mo, but still…) - this led me to register cellfive.xyz with cloudflare, which makes s3 hosting a little more interesting. Not too bad though, I can simply create CNAMEs in cloudflare to point to the s3 bucket public endpoint. I’d make the bucket policy only allow access from the cloudflare IPs.

That got more complex of course, I realised I’d have mixed SSL - secure to cloudflare, insecure between cloudflare to S3. Oh, and I’d have to manage the IPs in the bucket policy. I can get past that by making a Cloudfront distribution in front of S3, creating an ACM cert for the cloudfront distro, making the bucket private only and gatting ssl all the way through.

That would actually work, and the cost won’t be high - after all, we get 1TB free cloudfront per month, and the cloudflare CDN will stop most requests even getting there.

But this… is insane. I’m consciously uploading to S3 (using an access key stored in my home dir), and managing a bucket, iam user & policy, acm cert and cloudfront distro.

The penny dropped - cloudflare can do all of what I want! For pretty well nothing!

Cloudflare Pages lets you specify a git repo. When the main branch on the repo changes, that triggers a workflow that runs zola build, which updates the public folder - which is what we see right now at cellfive.xyz!