As part of my now 4-year old new year-new website tradtion I wanted to build a website entirely from scratch with HTML/CSS with a focus on speed and simplicty. I wanted to make the loading time as small as possible, almost instant. No additional bootstraping tools were to be used. The website is responsive and adapted for smartphones as well.
The most suprising challenge with this website was not to build it, but to actually host it in such a way that 1. its easy to deploy continuously and 2. take advantage of its speed to achive the goal of nearly instant loading. Problem #1 was solved by hosting it on Firebase since, thanks to their SDK CLI I could easily push any changed files, and only those, to the server serving static files. Firebases quick setup and additional features made it an easy choice for this use-case.
As for Problem #2 it wasnt as straight forward. I wanted to handle everything from AWS, but since no big cloud provider sells .se domain names (halco.se for ex.) I had to go via a web hotel, Loopia. However, their loading times were not acceptable to me and I had to look for a work-around. What I did was the following:
- Bought the domain name halco.se from Loopia.
- Upload static files to a firebase hosting server which comes with a URL.
- Transfered the domain names admin-rights to AWS Route 53.
- Create a DNS A-record in AWS to point to Firebase server.
This allowed me to serve the website in 600ms
You can find the website (directly on the firebase server) here: https://halco-website.web.app
This is currently not my newest website that is on the halco.se domain. The newest website you can find here: https://github.com/gustafvh/gatsbyjs-halco-website