AWS

A while back we wrote about building a WordPress-as-a-service platform on AWS — ALB, EC2, ACM, Route 53, the works. It worked great. It also cost real money every month to serve a portfolio site that changes a few times a year, and it kept a PHP stack, a database, and a pile of plugins patched and reachable from the internet for no good reason. So we retired it. This is the story of moving stefaniapana.design from that setup to a static Hugo site on GitHub Pages, with one hard requirement: visitors must not be able to tell. Same design, same URLs, same lazy loading, same everything. Here’s how that went, including the gotchas that bit us on the way. ...

Manually setting up PHP applications can be tedious and error-prone. By using AWS services and Terraform, we can automate our infrastructure setup, providing a scalable and secure environment for our PHP blog. This guide will walk we through a basic architecture, considerations, and common pitfalls. At the end, we’ll be able to host our blog with minimal effort and manage it like a pro. The Architecture The setup consists of the following components: ...