Building a Low Cost Static Website

Earlier this year I had to find a low cost alternative for running our family company’s website. For some historical reasons website was built on top of Liferay but it had not been updated much for several years. Our aim was to move away from having local servers and have everything running in cloud but with minimal costs. Running Liferay in cloud did not exactly fit that plan.

Roughly 10 years ago I was working in this company that sold their own CMS system. Running this CMS system required some resources (CPU, storage, database) and in some cases we archived old sites using tool called HTTrack to have the content available but without ability to modify it. I decided to try this same approach here. Idea was to have a copy of the website available in AWS S3 as static site. So my initial setup was quite simple. I downloaded the site using HTTrack and uploaded all the downloaded files to S3 bucket. I then turned on public web site hosting for this S3 bucket and changed the DNS records to point to S3 and the new static website was alive.

The problem with that site is that it is pretty much impossible to maintain unless you really enjoy modifying Liferay generated HTML by hand. So I started wonder that there must be a better way of doing static websites nowadays due to e.g. all those single page apps that are based on static files.

I came across this article The CMS Is Dead. Long Live Hugo, Wercker, Prose.io and CloudFront and decided to give Hugo a go and this site is my first attempt on that front.