I can already hear you as I'm writing this.
Zac, is there seriously a page on your webpage devoted to information about your webpage? Seriously?
The answer to this inevitable query is, in this order, 1) yes, and 2) don't call me Shirley (that joke will never get old).
Alright, so why is this magic? Why are we wasting webspace with this?
Maybe I'm just old. I was born in the 1980s so a lot of people on the internet call me "gramps" these days.
I was around *before* google existed. My generation is actually the last one affectionately called "Digital Immigrants" by some text book or other back in college. I remember a time when Google and Facebook technology didn't exist, and if you were looking for obscure information (generally hosted on a small private site like this one) about someone or something you had to go to altavista, then yahoo, then maybe Opera in the later days, and you could check dogpile, or whatever other search-aggregator was hot that month, maybe pop into msn.com if you're feeling lucky... it was exhausting.
So if you're as old as I am, or older, you'll appreciate when I tell you that I once had an Angelfire account. Don't know what that is? How about Geocities? They both predated Myspace. You've never been to Myspace? Go back to Fortnight and YouTube, Gen-Zer! You have no comprehension of the pre-digital hell I was forced to live through! Yeets away. Off to the tide pod cupboard with you, there's nothing for you here.
Still with me? Good. Then you may be old enough to recall having to deal with a domain provider, find SOMEONE to host your site, and pay an arm and/or a leg (and likely litter all your creative content with ads), or possibly try to host your website out of your home (after all, it's just a couple HTML files... why wouldn't I be able to run that off my 56k modem with a DDNS service to deal with IP shifts? No problem there, right?). Trying to put your own budget internet space up used to be an Orwellian nightmare, if you're OKequating inconvenience to fascism.
So did you just do... that? And now you wanna brag about it?
Absolutely
not. I am, in fact, the Sam-I-Am of webspace hosting through
private host providers, which is to say that I would not
could not find a space to host my website and pay someone or
deal with their ads or all the rules the go with trying to
run a small website for personal reasons.
Enter Amazon S3 Buckets.
Before I go any further I do want to point out that Amazon
still doesn't pay me for any of my testimony. In fact, I pay
them a little bit of $$$ to keep this bad boy up and on the
internet and with the traffic all flowing in the right
direction. But it's SO easy omg you guys.
Believe it or not, this entire site is hosted for under $2
a month using an S3 bucket. What is an S3 bucket? It's
basically just a really simple and highly available file
dump that anyone can sign up and use more or less for free.
The exact pricing scheme changes all the time but... cheap.
Dirt cheap. If you're storing less than a Gig of data (this
website clocks in at well under 100MB), you won't even
notice, and I'm pretty sure it's free for the first year.
Even if you have a larger webpage, provided you're using
static content (not php automation or anything goofy), you
can host for a couple bucks a month. I may pay a dollar or
two for the DNS redirects and I give Google $12/year for the
domain space. All totaled I run an entire personal website
with boatloads of extra storage for under $50/year. That's
amazing! Does anyone remember web building in the late 90s?!
$50/year to run a high quality site that's available
24/7/365 is unbelievable!
If cards were money and fire were a webpage than this image on the right pretty adequately sums up S3 webhosting technology. Imagine the whole trick takes about a year and the 3 aces cost about $50. Or pretend I'm just a stock photography nerd who liked this picture and wanted an excuse to use it.
I Highly Recommend it to Everyone
Don't get me wrong, I didn't have a personal webpage until 2019 (Well... there was an angelfire and geocities and wordpress thing but... we're just never gonna talk about that again). It also wasn't until 2019 that I knew there's basically free webspace just hanging out in amazon datacenters. Will your website be as cool and available as amazon.com? I mean... probably not, you don't have a constant team of webdev engineers making sure everything works right. It may not even be able to process basic transactions (although I'm sure it could if you were dedicated enough). But now that I know this exists, and now that *YOU* know this exists... what excuse could anyone possibly have for not having a private domain and webpage that links to their exclusive content an intellectual property?
And I'm sure I know what a lot of you are thinking. "Oh, Zac, I use linkedin and instagram and facebook and social media and wordpress and those are basically the same thing as having my own webpage." They aren't. They just... no. As a professional and as an adult (especially if you work in IT) in 2019, having a social media account lacks the same gravitas as a true, honest to goodness, domain-specific webpage. It's just a good way to tell everyone "hey I'm a professional," in a way that a .wordpress.com or a facebook.com/I'maprofession account never can. Seriously, consider making your own magic webpage for $2 a month on Amazon S3, there's loads of free resources to get you started, and literally millions of free webpage templates to get you going once you buy a little domain space. Or hey, shoot me an email at zachrhart@gmail.com and I'd be happy to get you started!