Web Infrastructure — static publishing, CDN, indexing, and domain services
Publish, deploy, index, and run mail on your domain.
Web infrastructure here means the systems that make publishing work on the open web. Static builds, object storage, CDN behavior, DNS for mail and verification, and indexing signals (sitemaps plus push protocols like IndexNow) sit in one cluster so you can ship fast, stay correct, and avoid reinventing SMTP or search engine plumbing.
Most posts are CLI-first and AWS-flavored because that is what I run in production. The point is not vendor loyalty. It is repeatable commands, clear trade-offs, and when to skip the clever self-hosted path.
Hugo deployment to AWS S3
Deploying Hugo to S3 is the main workload here. Prefer AWS CLI or CI so deploys are repeatable and you can wire cache invalidation and versioning the same way every time.
- Deploy Hugo site to AWS S3 — end-to-end bucket setup and deploy flow.
- Deploy Hugo site to AWS S3 with AWS CLI — deeper CloudFront invalidation, cache behavior, and automation.
- Using Gitea Actions to deploy Hugo to AWS S3 — CI/CD from Gitea without extra infrastructure.
After a successful deploy, IndexNow (below) is the natural next step so new URLs are not stuck waiting for crawlers only.
CloudFront setup
CloudFront pricing is easy to get wrong from the console alone. You often see Free or Pro flat-rate framing, while pay-as-you-go matches real traffic patterns better for many static sites.
- Create AWS CloudFront on pay-as-you-go (not the Free Plan) — AWS CLI path when you need a distribution that does not lock you into the wrong plan.
Indexing and search engine notification
Sitemaps help discovery. IndexNow pushes URL changes so participating engines can fetch sooner than crawl-only schedules.
- IndexNow explained — notify search engines when you publish — why the protocol exists, key file verification, POST shape, and automation patterns.
Run it after deploy when you care about fresh indexing for new or moved pages.
Domain services
Custom domain email is MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in practice. Pick a hosted provider unless mail is your product.
- Hosted email for custom domains compared — Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoho, Proton, WorkMail — cost bands, deliverability reality, and when not to self-host.
See also
- Data infrastructure — storage, pipelines, and retrieval when the problem is data, not the public web.
