Previously, I ran my website with a PHP-based CMS on a shared host and since quite some time I wanted to port it to a static site generator and serve it off of AWS S3. Finally, I found the time to do it. This post summarizes what and why I did my website as it is now, and what process and tools I used to achieve it.

Setting the Goal

With my old website running on Kirby CMS for years I had to maintain a shared host that runs it, and have Cloudflare setup to have improved loading times. Nevertheless, I frequently had outages due to issues on the shared hosting provider. Also, as I wanted to develop new features and improvements for my website I felt I had to invest a significant amount of time into the platform again, to understand and move forward. And spending time in the PHP ecosystem is something I did not want to do anymore. So something had to change.

SSH keys are a very convenient and secure way to authenticate with Git servers such as GitHub. I used to use a single SSH key for the few private repositories I had, but in the meantime I have accumulated quite a number of SSH keys. Having different SSH keys for different purposes (e.g. personal keys and keys used for client work) makes it simpler for me to organize and rotate keys.