Under $1 a month Hosting
Sunday, September 7, 2025
This is probably one of my exciting finds from few years ago. At that time, I wanted to modernize my old personal site and not having to pay $12 a month for hosting. My requirements were cheap to host, using newer technology, and easy to maintain.
I started addressing the requirements one by one. Starting from cost, I found out that compute is expensive, so I need something that doesn't require much compute power. For website, the answer is static files, such as plain HTML, CSS, Javascript files.
But static files are hard to maintain. That's when newer technology helps. In this area, the answer is SPA (Single-Page Application). However, I need one that supports SSG (Static Site Generator). It means, the application will be transformed into static files.
Now, my old site has database. But I really only care about the data, so I decided to use JSON (Javascript Object Notation) files which can be easily parsed by SPA. That solves my data issue.
Finally hosting. The cheapest hosting I can find is $2-3 a month. So, I turned to cloud, in this case, I use AWS. With it, I can finally host my personal site under $1 a month. My October 2025 cost was only $0.53. And it's not only for 1 site, I have multiple sites hosted in AWS.