Have you ever felt the urge to create your own website, using a unique, fancy domain name? Fortunately, publishing a simple, static web site is both cheap and simple.

Nowadays, there are numerous ways how to accomplish this goal. This short article will quickly take you through the required steps in combination with Amazon Web Services (AWS) - which is exactly what I did for this blog.

The features offered by AWS may appear overwhelming at first. However, both Amazon and the community provide tons of detailed tutorials and step-by-step guides. These guides are especially useful if you know where to start:

  • Create an AWS account.
  • Upload your static web site to AWS Amplify.
    • Until you have registered your domain name (see below), you can access this domain using a generated, cryptic name for test purposes.
  • Choose and register a domain name via AWS Route 53.
    • Note that the registration process can take up to 3 days. You will receive an e-mail as soon as the domain name can be used.
  • Link your domain name to your Amplify website.

The costs that I have to pay for this so far are:

  • Yearly fee for your DNS name (depending on which top-level-domain you chose, ranging from 9 USD to more than 100 USD).
  • Monthly fee for Route 53 (hosted zone and DNS queries) at around 1 USD.