So my friends suggested AWS S3 as a good way to host static blog site, and I had been meaning to do this transition for a few years, but just never put to high on the to-do list.
I decided to use S3 & CloudFront in the REST API endpoint as the origin, with access restricted by an OAI method. I also choose to make CloudFront accept only HTTPS, I was moving to the future..
I then hunted through backups looking for all the files, as I was super lazy and only had sub-folders of the site save on my current PC, and then uploaded all that to s3. I turned on CloudFront via the great temp domain: https://dyk3v11u6y5ii.cloudfront.net/nikon-patch/nikon-patch.html which still works!
Once the domain transferred, had more days while things propagated, before Route53 would let me add a cert, and after adding that is ages ~hour to propagate, so you can have the auto-fill in CloudFront to select the alias domain. All fun stuff, trying to working why it was not working..
Then I setup Lambda@Edge script to auto convert the blog/postname/ requests into /blog/postname/index.html which is how the files actually are in S3, not said so far, but AWS has really good documentation, that major flaw is you find the wrong doc’s when googling, but once you are seeing the current/correct Lambda@Edge doc’s the UI/Code makes sense. The Doc‘s I followed, and the script I more or less used.
I installed a 403 error handler, that loads my 404-page.html page, which has a Google Analytics Event so I can see which pages are getting 404.
I used to have a rather large collection of url rewrites on the Windows server, so once this was done my base page hits was more aligned with how it used to be:
Once I had the 404 page, I found my own blog posts where the major source of bad links, joys of a Window webhost, all files are equal.
I did a number of alteration to Hexo modules so the blog behaves as I wanted, and a large amount of mass editing of old posts, but those can have their own posts, in the future.
But so far, the monthly bills ignoring the domain transfer have all been sub $1 nzd/month (and $0.50 is the fixed Route 53 charge), so it’s a rather pleasing savings.