My dad's work on his site inspired me to resurrect my site. I hadn't done any non-primary-employment-related web development in a long time. I wanted to do this "right". For me, that means:
This site is very simple. It may grow, but I'm not envisioning anything particularly complex. So simple is the name of the game. Also, I want widely-distributed tools that will stick around and for which there are lots of resources. Given that, I'm going with:
git and GitHub was an easy decision. I use git at work and it is widely used. My repository includes not just the web content, but also build/configuration and deployment scripts. I picked GitHub simply because I'm familiar with their name and I've tinkered with them before.
Bootstrap and JQuery seemed like obvious choices. They're popular and easy to use. As an added bonus, I've used (and continue to use) them in my professional life.
I initially built this site using PHP. This was my first PHP project ever and it was a great opportunity to learn a very popular langauge. But eventually I decided to try Flask and I like it a lot more than PHP. (This is also my first Flask site.)
I'm a Linux/Unix/Mac guy, so Linux was the obvious OS. I initially used Amazon Lightsail, but later switched to EC2. IAM and the ability to use other AWS tools, like CodePipeline and CodeDeploy, are big reasons to prefer EC2 over Lightsail.