Self-Hosted WordPress

My first encounter with WordPress was back in 2019 when I was studying for my first AWS certification test. In order to gain practical experience while learning and studying I decided to create my own website running on AWS.

My original WordPress site was built using Elastic Beanstalk with an external RDS Database running MySQL. The solution also used an ELB to provide public access to the website. The architecture design was not fully developed to be highly available but at the time it served it’s purpose.

Now, six years later, I decided to get back into WordPress and experiment with possibilities. I have plenty of experience over the years spanning multiple areas of expertise. This along with my interest in music, fitness, diet, nutrition, and everything to live an active lifestyle as long as possible gives me plenty of categories to publish blog posts like this one.

Anyway, back to the topic. This WordPress site is also running on AWS but this time I did not use Beanstalk and built my own single EC2 instance running Debian Linux with nginx, PHP, and MariaDB. This site is using an ALB, and the domain is registered in Route53. The SSL certificate was created using ACM and associated with the ALB.

Just like before this architecture is not HA but I will take it slow and see where I go with this before I invest more time and money in a more robust architecture. You can be rest assured that there are plenty of WordPress sites out there that are running businesses and selling everything and anything there is to sell. With that said if I can find a way to leverage WordPress to generate supplemental income in my retirement years that would be awesome!

Wish me luck!