How To Use Your Mac To Build A Massive Website And Not Worry About Servers

So, you want to build and run your own website? Guess what? Me, too.

It’s been on my list for a few years to build my own tech and personal blog instead of slaving over a hot keyboard for someone else. Websites seem to come two ways. Too simple. Or, too complicated. Here’s one solution I like.

This One Is Fast And Cheap

On the too simple side of the ledger are sites such as Blogger or WordPress. They’re free. They’re easy. There’s no or little maintenance. And they’re boring.

At the other end of the scale one could use WordPress’ free app (used by more bloggers worldwide than any other).

Sure, WordPress is free, but hosting the site is not. Plus, there’s a database to worry about and manage, and if your site is popular, the monthly cost goes up dramatically.

Is there a better way? Better, as with beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, so consider this an alternative which is both simple and elegant, yet powerful enough to handle lots of website traffic.

First, add SandVox to your Mac. SandVox, like RapidWeaver, is one of the premier website building tools. You won’t need to know HTML or CSS or PHP or MySQL or any of the buzzwords.

SandVox works similar to Apple’s old iWeb site builder. It’s drag and drop. Select a site theme, add sidebars, photos, blog pages, a photo or movie gallery, and all the modern Web 2.0-like bells and whistles.

Now what? SandVox makes a great site, and it’s all HTML and CSS, so there’s no complicated maintenance to worry about. What you hope for is lots of visitors to the site. More visitors means more pages served and viewed, and that can drive up server and hosting costs.

Second, to make your site serve quickly on the web, and to improve up time to well over 99.99-percent, host your site on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, Amazon S3.

The advantage to using Amazon S3 is that the initial cost is low, setup is easy, it’s highly reliable (over 99.9999999-percent), fully redundant, and website pages are served quickly.

You’ll need an FTP app which can upload your SandVox site files to Amazon. I recommended Transmit, but CyberDuck will do the same thing and it’s free (most FTP apps do not connect to Amazon).

If there’s a negative, it’s the upload process to send your updated pages to Amazon, but that can be automated so you don’t need to sit and watch the progress bar during the upload.

Point your domain name to your account and bucket on Amazon S3, and that’s all there is to it. The cost of entry is low, dependability and scalability is high, and Amazon’s S3 servers are about as reliable as servers can be.

From Appletown

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