About this website

The website is cloud-hosted using AWS free tier components (Total cost $12/year for domain name including SSL cert). It is "stick built", meaning all of the HTML/CSS, PHP and JavaScript (both front and back end) is written by hand (vs. created by a 'Framework').

The AWS environment consists of a single EC2 instance front-ended with an Application Load Balancer (with a few configuration changes via my EC2 dashboard it can easily be fully scalable and geographically redundant with AWS's elastic compute capability (of course that would incur monthly charges)). The EC2 Server is running a LAMP stack w/proxy for Node Express.js along with development applications and services such as xterm, emacs, FTP. My laptop is running an Xquartz X-server allowing EC2 server-based applications such as xterm or emacs to display via the ssh session tunnel to 'pop-up' on my laptop. Web pages are developed on my laptop using visual studio with Ritwick Dey's Live Server/node-dev and uploaded to the AWS cloud host site.