Intro to aws

In my forays into software / webdev, I’ve purchased a handful of domain names for random things I want to post on the internet. Namecheap has been my go to, with bare bones and low prices (unlike GoDaddy, which tried to upsell me on TLS certs… for $25pa, on top of an already steep ~$75pa domain hosting fee). On namecheap, I’ve been able to find interesting domain names (with certs) for, consistently, in the ballpark of ~$10pa.

Imagine my surprise when I received a renewal notice that the cost of all of my domain names were about to 10x or more as the result of some (this is an oversimplification) deregulatory efforts. On further sleuthing, it also looks like domains with popular TLD extensions are going for $’000s 🤯.

To keep things affordable, I’ll be posting to subdomains of my personal website instead going forward - like this little, loser flaskapp, and this very blog (which used to be at pennymark.ink; I only mention because I thought the name + extension had a poetic lilt to it).

This has given me a little bit of familiarity with Route 53, which I’m using to host the domain name and all the sub-domains, and Lambda (where the aforementioned Flask app is currently located, as it’s simple enough to not require a session). I’m currently also trying to think of a variety of apps - possibly a data-driven dashboard or something - that I can host across docker containers on EC2.