I bought this domain, mohamedanassar.com from GoDaddy. But then wanted to host it on AWS. I won’t go here into the technical reasons as to why I wanted to do that. But lets just agree that I did.
The “official” way to do that is by transferring domain ownership to Amazon’s Route53 service. However this would have cost me money for the transfer, plus about $1 per month to keep it there. I figured there must be a workaround.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
I thought I’d first start by signing up for AWS, which I did. You can get your free account too at http://aws.amazon.com.
I knew I wanted to start with a WordPress website. And by reading I figured the best option for my need was EC2. So I first started by creating an EC2 instance on amazon AWS. I then proceeded to deploy WordPress on that instance.
You can do this the old fashion way by installing it yourself, or you could go the faster route by just using the ready wordpress image from AWS Marketplace. You can find that here WordPress Certified by Bitnami. This image is can be run in the AWS free tier, which is what I aimed for as a start.
Then from there, it was actually relatively simple to figure out. In your AWS Console, you will see your instance looking something like this:
You’ll notice the with the Public DNS and Public IPv4. This is the magic number.
If you remember anything about the WWW. You’ll know that now simply all I needed to do was convince the internet that my URL https://mohamedanassar.com actually points to my instance public IP. Which luckily can be done easily by modifying the DNS settings.
Back to GoDaddy
You can see this in your console:
Clicking on the DNS button takes you to the page where you can adjust your domain DNS settings. You should see something like this:
You will need to change the record A to Public IPv4 of your running EC2 instance on AWS. Set that, wait a few minutes. And voila, you have a GoDaddy domain linking to your AWS EC2 instance.
Recap / tl;dr
- Setup your AWS account here aws.amazon.com
- Setup an instance (in my case EC2, but YMMV).
- Optionally install WordPress Certified by Bitnami
- Get your instance public IPv4
- Use that as your A record in your domain DNS Management Console.
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