This website, rebuilt on my own account

I moved this site off a website builder onto my own account, the same pattern I use for clients.

What changed

Clients' systems run in accounts they own, and mine should too.

Pages are plain HTML at the edge, with no builder scripts and no tracking cookies.

Old links still land on the right page. Password-protected client portals stay where they were.

The old site was backed up and left running, so going back is one DNS change.

A few cents a month at this traffic, plus the domain. No website-builder subscription is needed for the public site.

The simplest serious setup: a private bucket behind a CDN, with a small function at the edge to handle addresses.

Colors follow AWS service categories; grey is outside the account; dashed lines are background paths. Swipe the diagram sideways.

Step by step

Visitors and search engines reach CloudFront over HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, with security headers on every response.
A router function at the edge sends the bare domain to www, turns clean addresses into files, and forwards old addresses to their new pages.
Pages are served from a private, versioned S3 bucket.
Client-portal addresses are handed to the old site, where their password protection still works.

For your IT person: components, trade-offs and security. Open any section.

Components

Layer	Service	What it does here
Build	Python generator	Renders every page from one template with its own title, description, canonical and social tags, and structured data. It writes the sitemap and robots file, and produces WebP images alongside the JPEGs.
Edge	CloudFront + CloudFront Function	HTTP/3, compression, strict content-security policy and HSTS. The router function handles redirects without a round trip to the origin.
Origin	S3 (private, versioned)	Readable only through CloudFront (origin access control). Pages are never cached stale; images cache for a week.
Certificate	ACM	Covers the bare domain and www. DNS-validated in Cloudflare.
Delivery	CloudFormation + deploy script	One template. The script refuses to run against any client account, syncs the files and clears the cache.
Quality	Playwright	Loads every page at desktop and phone widths and fails on errors, broken links or horizontal overflow.

Design decisions and trade-offs

Static, not a CMSNo server, no database, nothing to patch. Editing means rebuilding, which is quick and puts every change under version control.

Redirects at the edgeOld links keep their search value and never hit a dead end.

DNS stays in CloudflareEmail and other records stayed untouched. Only the website records moved.

Rollback kept warmThe old site keeps running behind the scenes, so reverting is one DNS change.

Tell me how the work moves today. I'll tell you what I'd build and what it would cost.