✅ Day 16 of My Cloud Journey ☁️ — Deploying a Static Website Using NGINX on EC2

Today I explored how to host a static website using NGINX on an EC2 instance. This is a fundamental real-world scenario that helps understand web server configuration, static content delivery, and securing access via security groups.

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🧱 Why NGINX?

NGINX is a high-performance web server that’s great for serving static content like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc. It’s also widely used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and caching server — so learning it now pays off later.

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🔧 Step-by-Step Setup

1. Launch an EC2 Instance

   • Choose Amazon Linux 2 or Ubuntu

   • Place it in a public subnet

   • Attach a Security Group allowing:

     • TCP Port 22 (SSH) from your IP

     • TCP Port 80 (HTTP) from 0.0.0.0/0

2. Connect to EC2 via SSH

3. Install NGINX

   • For Amazon Linux:

       sudo yum install nginx -y
       sudo systemctl start nginx
       sudo systemctl enable nginx
     

   • For Ubuntu:

       sudo apt update
       sudo apt install nginx -y
       sudo systemctl start nginx
       sudo systemctl enable nginx
     

4. Upload Your Static Website

   • Replace default content:

       sudo rm -rf /usr/share/nginx/html/*
     

   • Upload your index.html, styles.css, etc. via scp or manually using an SFTP client.

   • Place files in:

       /usr/share/nginx/html/
     

5. Verify

   • Visit your EC2's public IP in the browser: http://<public-ip>

   • Your static site should load ✅

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🧰 Optional Enhancements

• Add a custom domain via Route 53

• Use CloudFront for caching and faster delivery

• Add SSL (using Let’s Encrypt or ACM for HTTPS)

• Store static content in S3 and proxy through NGINX

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🤝 Key Learnings

• Hosting static files with NGINX is straightforward

• Importance of correct file permissions and paths

• Keeping web servers stateless = better scaling

• Security Group config directly impacts site accessibility

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📸 Output

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📅 What’s Next?

Day 17: Deep Dive into Hosting WordPress on AWS EC2 using LAMP Stack (Apache)
Tomorrow, I’ll walk through launching a WordPress blog by manually setting up the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP — on an EC2 instance.

I’ll also cover the key differences between LAMP and LEMP (where NGINX replaces Apache) and when to use which. This will give me the flexibility to host dynamic web apps using either stack in real-world projects.