💻 Finding a Cheap Hosting Solution for a Website
My experience looking for a cheap way to host a website
When I started off selling 3D printing services I wanted a website to host pictures, get leads and more importantly, you needed a website to apply for Fusion360's startup tier where you get their CAD software for free instead of the several hundreds of dollars a year. Here's a post where I talk more about my time selling 3D Prints - 3D Printing Services Business. But in this post I talk about finding a cheap site and also I include how to get the best and cheapest way to host a website.
☁️ AWS EC2
The first site I set up was on AWS as a EC2 virtual machine. I launched a T2 Micro instance, the smallest EC2 instance you can get and set up a nginx web server. I then found a free website template I think from W3Schools and modified it to my own somewhat. The site was not great, once I put some photos on it, it really lagged and took awhile to load. It cost me around $10 a month from AWS and that was with virtually no traffic. Just a webserver, straight on the public internet, no security, firewalling or anything. But the site didn't have any functionality, there was no contact form, quoting system or anything. Just photos, text and links.
Here's what it looked like when you first went to the site:
🌐 Web Hosting Services
Since I wanted something better, I started looking around actual web hosting services. I looked at W3Schools hosting, WordPress, Bluehost, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Durable, Shopify and some others I can't remember right now. I wanted something with a little bit of functionality like a contact form and newsletter. Also I wanted it to be flexible, if I could edit the raw HTML and CSS code that would be great. To meet what I wanted, almost every service was around $30 a month. So it really came down to what I got for that price.
🛍️ Landing on Shopify
I ended up going with a Shopify store page. I was able to get a free theme and edit the raw website files to get the look I wanted. I was able to add a contact form and a newsletter. I was also able to add a chatbot service and get a customer management system. I was able to get all this for $30 a month and that was after a 3 month trial.
I changed how the site looked several times, here's 2 of the looks after I stopped selling 3D print services and played around with a IT Services agency:
🎁 The Surprise Offer
When I decided to stop selling 3D Prints and services I went to close my Shopify site. Shopify then offered me a $9 a month plan to keep the site up but without the checkout functionality. I wasn't using the checkout functionality anyway so I took the offer, till obviously building this site. But what's crazy is that for $9 a month you get everything Shpoify offers just without checkout.
🔥 An Even Cheaper Alternative: Firebase
So after quite some time since I first tried to set up my own website on AWS, I have learned a lot more about web development and tools to help you. I had heard about Google's Firebase hosting and started building this site on which I go into more detail about in my post - The Blog Post About the Blog. But Firebase has a free tier usage, so as long as you don't go over their usage limits, you can host a website for free. You just have to build it yourself. And their usage limits are quite generous in my opinion.
📝 Conclusion
So I'm not saying it's worth saving $9 a month to build a website on your own, just to save $9 a month. I did it to learn more about web development and programming in general so I can build other things that I'm sure I'll post about. I do like having my own custom site that I can make look my own. I feel some of these hosting platforms that have a GUI that you build a site from, in the end have a similar feel and look. If you have any questions in regards to this post, feel free to reach out!