There are many approaches to hosting a website nowadays, and many rely on major cloud providers such as AWS or Azure. These fully fledged cloud platforms offer a wide range of services for different use cases. While these services provide major benefits—like managed infrastructure, scalability, and support—for many projects they are simply overkill. This often leads to analysis paralysis, where it feels like you need a separate service for everything. Do you need logs? Use a managed service. Do you need a database? Use a managed service. Do you need to back up your server? Use a managed service. All of this quickly adds up to unnecessary costs, which can be a dealbreaker for smaller projects. In my case, I just wanted to deploy a WordPress blog while maintaining control over the server, with as little management and software installation as possible, and keeping costs low. I initially considered using an AWS EC2 instance for hosting the blog.…