How to install Let's Encrypt certificate on Joomla website hosted on Amazon Lightsail and secure your website
In my previous blog post, I wrote about setting up Host joomla on Amazon Lightsail
Amazon offers an amazing platform to host your website on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for a reasonable cost. I have been blogging since 2009 and I remember the cost of VPS would start at 30$ per month. Today, the cost is 10 times cheaper and the infrastructure is reliable and scalable.
There are lots of advantage in having your website hosted on a virtual private server however, there is one drawback which I see is managing and maintaining the server by yourself. Honestly, maintaining a website is not an easy task. Apart from publishing quality contents, you also have to take care of security, privacy, updates to the Joomla system and the underlying systems like PHP. With any virtual private server, you have to maintain the server and it is time consuming.
Your website is incomplete without HTTPS. Search engines prefer and rank based on HTTPS so that is another reason to enable HTTPS on your website.
What is Amazon Lightsail
With Amazon Lightsail, you can deploy a virtual private server with just a few clicks using preconfigured images for your favorite Linux distribution, application, or dev stack. It is reliable, scalable and cost effective. Which makes it ideal for students, developers who want to experiment.
Lightsail offers the following in their plans
- Static IP address
- DNS management
- Server monitoring
- SSH terminal access (Linux/Unix)
- Intuitive management console
- Secure key management
- Cost management
Alright, lets check the basic requirements,
1. You need a domain(that's obvious isn't it). If you need to buy a new domain name, you can get it in NamesCheap
2. You need an account in Amazon Web Services(AWS) or the Amazon Lightsail (You can use an existing Amazon account). If you don't have an account, please signup here.
Okay, assuming you have a domain name and an account with amazon Lightsail lets get started.