I’ve dabbled with many wordpress installations and sites over the years. It’s always felt pretty easy: buy a domain and hosting, install wordpress and blog. The convenience comes at a cost where places like Namecheap and GatorHost will charge anywhere from $5 and above for anyone who does not want to get their hands dirty. This also meant a shared host with sub-optimal performance/load times since they want you to buy their premium tier offerings.

This was a conscious effort to try out AWS and Lightsail to see if it as easy as advertised.

https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/launch-a-wordpress-website

If the page is to be believed, it takes all of 10 minutes to setup a WordPress site, powered by Lightsail.

Noting that the last updated tutorial was on 4th August 2022, the UI elements have now slightly shifted and I spent a decent chunk of time figuring out where to setup my DNS zones. (Definite sign of ageing)

Time Wasters

I also found out that my previous AWS account has gone dormant. AWS simply does not allow you to renew/restart that account. Rather you are caught in a very interesting “You dont have an account/You have an account” loop. I had to create a new email before I could get my Lightsail AWS account up and running. Interesting choice of process.

Once I got past this hurdle, the tutorial was about 80% on point with getting the job done. It did not explain too well what you had to do with the Domain Registrars but tutorials from Namecheap got it covered.

This was my first brush with Bitnami so it was delightful to see how easy it was to get a SSL certificate generated and assigned to the site. DNS propagation took a fair chunk of time so while the initial setup failed, a retry 30 minutes later got me sorted.

I’d like to think that my tech background made this easy, so it will be interesting to see how a less tech savvy person feels about it.