Beginnings: Lightsail is kind of great

I’ve been intending to build out a blog for quite a while now. Every time that I remember that I own my domain and have had a static page in place for several years, I think that I should probably do something more active with it. Usually, I then spin up a dev box, spend an afternoon configuring and installing utilities, setup a web server, install some frameworks, and by the time I’m done I’ve forgotten why I even started.

This time was different because I came across Amazon Lightsail.

AWS has always been a bit overpowered for just spinning up a simple web server. I’ve spun up a few EC2 instances here and there and toyed around with some service builds, but it’s always more work than I have time to sustain and I eventually fall off. Lightsail meets me in the middle by offering a quick VPS, based around some pre-configured images, that took a few minutes to deploy and configure.

In the Beginnings series I’ll document my experience with Amazon Lightsail, the server I’m managing, and other interesting tools I come across for managing this site. Stay tuned!