Day 3 of going All-in on AWS.

Yesterday, I secured my wallet with AWS Budgets. Today, I wanted to feel the rush of actually "shipping" something visible.

I come from using platforms like Netlify and Vercel. They are amazing—you drag, drop, and boom: you have a site with a free SSL certificate (HTTPS) in seconds. But as I’m training to be a Cloud Architect, I realized those platforms abstract away all the "plumbing." I wanted to see what happens under the hood.

So today, I did it the hard way. I hosted my personal "Digital Business Card" directly on Amazon S3.

The "Netlify vs. S3" Realization

The first thing I noticed when I deployed? The browser warned me: "Not Secure."

If you look at my screenshot, you’ll see the HTTP protocol.

Netlify/Vercel: They automatically handle the SSL/TLS certificates for you.

Raw AWS S3: It gives you a web endpoint, but it’s HTTP only by default. To get that green padlock here, I would need to set up AWS CloudFront (a CDN) to manage the certificates.

I could have easily just used Netlify, but doing this manually on S3 forced me to understand why the secure lock matters and how infrastructure blocks connect.

How I built it (The "Serverless" way)

Step 1: The Setup I created a bucket with a unique name. Pro Tip: If you want to use a custom domain later, the bucket name must match the domain exactly!

Step 2: The Security Dance On Vercel, public access is the default. On AWS, it’s the opposite. I had to uncheck "Block all public access" and write a Bucket Policy to explicitly allow strangers to read my files. It feels scary to see those orange warning banners in the console, but that is how the public web works.

Step 3: The Result I uploaded my simple HTML file (no React, no heavy frameworks today) and enabled static hosting.

It loaded instantly. It’s simple, but it’s mine. It lives on an Amazon data center in Stockholm (eu-north-1), and it scales automatically.

Here is the result. It’s officially my new home on the cloud.

Tomorrow? Maybe we fix that "Not Secure" warning, or maybe we add some compute power. Stay tuned.