So I’ve decided to take the plunge into the world of blogging and website hosting.

My initial motivation to venture into this world is to have a nice format to publish reviews of books I read. My secondary motivation being to learn the details associated with setting up and hosting websites.

An initial search of website options led me to WordPress as the best option for a self-hosted website, and a fee other options for non-self-hosted websites (e.g. Blogger, Squarespace, WordPress.com). Seeing the benefit in learning the nuts and bolts that sit behind the website, I decided to go down the, self-hosted, WordPress path.

Next I needed to figure out where to host my WordPress site. From past participation in some hackathons (Unearthed MineHack and Unearthed Perth 2017) I received some AWS credits and wanted to figure out what they could do for me.

Having decided to host a WordPress site on AWS, I then needed to figure out how I would get everything setup and working. AWS has a nice tutorial to get things rolling using Bitnami which is quick and easy to setup. However as I want to understand the back-end I opted for a do-it-yourself (DIY) setup. This consists of a LAMP stack ( L inux (Ubuntu in particular), A pache (web-server), M ySQL (database), P HP (server-side scripting)) with WordPress running on top.