After 280 days of an invalid Let’s Encrypt cert sitting on my site and blocking the 10s of individuals interested in viewing it I finally took the plunge and migrated the site away from Digital Ocean.

I’ve been using Digital Ocean for quite a while now. At the time I adopted it, it was a very un-intimidating way of hosting. And inexpensive too - £5 a month for the 512mb, SSD and for EU based hosting compared to the “Wordpress shared host” style equivalents at the time was fantastic!

However over time the site has shrunk in complexity. Initially it was a Wordpress hosted site with a varnish caching layer, PHP FPM and all sorts of other weird and wonderful addons. Then I migrated content to Jekyll and configured a hook to redeploy the site with a simple Nginx layer in front of it.

But despite the reduction in complexity, it’s not been without its problems. For one, the droplet was running Ubuntu 12, and as I alluded to earlier, my integration with Let’s Encrypt failed a lot… Almost monthly.

In November of last year I decided enough was enough, I was not going to fix my Let’s Encrypt integration again and instead I would work on an AWS “serverless” solution.

I went through a few thought patterns of how I might design the solution. I knew that, given the site is essentially static, S3 would be the best place to host the site files. Initially I looked at the S3 static site hosting option, which is most likely the simplest integration, but I wanted a couple extra features I knew would be possible / easier with a few extra components.

Those being:

  • SSL
  • CDN distributed content
  • Option to add server side logic (I’m thinking mostly forms)

Looking into Cloudfront I saw that the pricing tiers for traffic as low as mine are very good, it’s all traffic based, no minimum spend. So the final design is.

R53 -> Cloudfront -> S3 bucket

And I have a Code Build integration to retrieve the site assets from a private bitbucket repo where I store the site / posts, perform a Jekyll build and push to S3.

And there you have it. A mere 280 days of downtime later, I now have an entirely serverless, geo distributed, on demand price based website.