Bought a Domain and Made an "Under Const ...

Bought a Domain and Made an "Under Construction" site!

Feb 20, 2021

Last night I was on the AWS Route 53 service looking at domains I could buy and register. Wanted to make something simple for me and not be too commercial. I did some searches and saw that "brandonscloud.com" was available. Perfect! Simple and to the point. I bought the domain for $12/year and registered it on AWS. From there I wanted to find some webpage to put up to show that I was "working on something."

So I started searching for website templates. Wanted to make the site responsive and mobile-friendly, and then started to look at Bootstrap. For those of you that don't know what Bootstrap is, it is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites. (You can learn more about Bootstrap 4 at https://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap4/default.asp)

I then found a Bootstrap template which I thought was pretty cool to use for an announcement page that would show something "Under Construction". I didn't want something with a countdown, because who knows when I would have the time to finish the site. https://startbootstrap.com/theme/coming-soon

I liked the theme, so I downloaded and started tinkering with it in Adobe Dreamweaver. Wanted to definitely remove the sign-up feature, because I have yet to figure out how that would work. Didn't want the social media buttons on it either. Those were easily removed. 20 min later I was ready to go. I then loaded all the website files to an AWS S3 bucket and went to bed.

This morning at work, I started to configure the S3 static website (S3 = AWS Simple Storage Service) and knew I wanted to put my domain name on it on a Cloudfront distribution. (Cloudfront is AWS's CDN (Content Delivery Network) where your content is made globally available.) Having done this a few months ago with my girlfriend's editing website, I thought I remembered how to configure it all correctly. Yea.... I was wrong. AWS and cloud developers are good about providing you step-by-step tutorials and I should have looked for one. So instead of configuring it all in 20 min, I was banging my head at it for about an hour (when I should have been working on other things at work). Here is the AWS tutorial I should have used:

https://medium.com/faun/how-to-host-your-static-website-with-s3-cloudfront-and-set-up-an-ssl-certificate-9ee48cd701f9

(I used a single S3 bucket because you can create A records, for www.domain.com and domain.com, pointing to the same Cloudfront Distribution.)

I did get it all configured and ready to rock. A static website, on a Cloudfront CDN distribution, assigned to my own domain, and secured with a free SSL certificate (from AWS).

So please go enjoy brandonscloud.com which has a link to this BuyMyCoffee page. That button was provided free here.

Big thanks to those who have bought me a coffee!!! You guys are the best. And much love to my girlfriend, Crystal, for all her love and support.

Got another WGU exam tomorrow for "Introduction to Cryptography," which I should pass. Eventually, I will get to the course that has me taking the AWS SysOps Administrator Associate certification exam.

Hope to post more soon!

-Brandon

Enjoy this post?

Buy Brandon Bowman a coffee

More from Brandon Bowman