Hello Friends, I hope you are doing great and are in high spirits. In this article I will show you how you can create a About me page for you professional profile absolutely free using AWS S3 cloud services Static Website hosting feature.
As an example here is the link of the page I creted: http://dotnet4all.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
Being a developer and knowing technical things comes with an advantage and you are one such blessed person.
First of all, let learn about the S3 service. The is the primary service which we would be using for this small task.
S3 or simple storage service provided by AWS is used for object storage. We cannot store blob based objects in S3 like operating systems or database. You can learn more about S3 at this link: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
S3 can also be used to host static web sites. This is the main concept I will use.
If you do not have an AWS account. I would suggest you to create one here: https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup#/start
How To Host a static Website in AWS S3
After you have create a free account. Login to the console and click on the “Services” in the top left corner.
Search for “S3” and click on it. Once you are on S3 console. Click on “Create Bucket” as shown in the figure below:
Buckets are like folders present on the internet in AWS data center. You cannot have two buckets with same name globally. Even if someone else has create a bucket, you cannot create the bucket with same name.
You need to be careful in picking the bucket name.
Once you click on “Create Bucket”. You will be presented with a pop up where you need to enter the bucket details as shown in the figure below.
You need to enter only the bucket name. I have entered the name as “dotnet4all”.
Click next and you will be under “Configure options”. No need to do any change on this screen. Click Next.
AWS S3 Permissions for Web Page Hosting
Now you are navigated to the “Set Permissions” Tab. In this tab you need to remove the “Remove public access granted through public ACLs (Recommended)” permission.
Let the other settings be as it is as shown in the figure below.
We have to remove this permission to make our web page publicly accessible. AWS S3 provides a very fine grained set of permissions to make the objects and buckets very safe and secure. That is the beauty of S3.
Click next and Review you settings. And Finish the process.
You can see the newly created bucket in the S3 console.
Before going further you can download the HTMl template for the resume from the link: https://onepagelove.com/minimal-resume
Uploading the HTML File to S3 For Web Page Hosting
Click on the bucket name in the S3 console to go to the bucket console. These steps are particularly to upload the desired HTML files to the bucket.
These HTML files will be hosted in the S3 bucket and be browsed by anyone from anywhere in the world.
One clicked on the bucket name, you can see the below console.
Go the properties tab and click on the “Static Web Site Hosting” as shown in the figure below.
On this window check “Use this bucket to host a website”. And enter “index.html” and “error.html” in the Index Document and Error Document text boxes respectively. Click “Save”
Come back to the Overview tab in the above screen And click on “Upload” screen.
You will be presented with the Upload pop up. The pop up can be used to upload the files and folders to this bucket. Download the resume template HTML files from https://onepagelove.com/minimal-resume.
Before uploading the files, go to the permission tab. Edit the permissions and uncheck “Block new public ACLs and uploading public objects (Recommended)“. Once files are uploaded you can select the check box.
Unzip on your system. Upload the .index.HTML and styles.css files as shown in the figure below.
You can change the .HTML file as per your need. You should know the basics of HTML to do it.
Once files are uploaded, click Next. Select “Grant pulbic read access to this object(s) ” as shown in the figure below. Ignore the warning. And Finally Click Upload.
Once uploaded, go to the AWS S3 bucket properties. Click on Static Website hosting as shown in Figure 5.
There you will get the URL of the Web Page you have just uploaded.
Conclusion
In this article I have shown how you can create a free Web page of your own without spinning any server. I have used the Static Website hosting feature of AWS S3 to create a free about me page.
In my next article, I will add a “Contact Me” section to the same web page , and people can contact you on your mail without spinning any server.