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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

Just to point out, there's no particular reason to host a page like this on a VPS at all. You could just throw it on S3. Even better, you could put it behind a CDN like Cloudfront and the total cost would be a dollar or two a month, not $25+ and it would be significantly faster.

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> You could just throw it on S3. Even better, you could put it behind a CDN like Cloudfront and the total cost would be a dollar or two a month, not $25+ and it would be significantly faster.

I apologize for quibbling (really, I do! but I'm an infrastructure guy! This is my bag!). Yes, host it on S3, but ALWAYS put a CDN in front of S3 with long cache times (even just Cloudfront works). S3 can sporadically take hundreds of milliseconds to complete a request, and you know, AWS bandwidth is expensive (and CDN invalidation is damn near free). And you can use your own SSL cert at the CDN usually instead of relying on AWS' "s3.amazonaws.com" SSL cert (although you will still rely on the that S3 SSL cert for CDN->S3 Origin connections; C'est la vie).

EDIT: It also appears Cloudfront supports HTTP/2 as of today. Hurray!

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/09/amazon-cl...

How long S3 takes to fulfil a request does not affect bandwidth.

I personally went the other way. I still use CloudFront as a CDN but made it cache items for short periods of time. Invalidation was too much of a hassle, and it took too long. Admittedly, I should use hashes or something of the sort to keep my items versioned, but laziness always gets in the way.

> How long S3 takes to fulfil a request does not affect bandwidth.

Correct. Did I insinuate that? I apologize if I did. They are two distinct issues, both of which a CDN prevents.

1. S3 outbound bandwidth is expensive. Use it only as an object store of last resort. Your CDN bandwidth is orders of magnitude cheaper (don't believe me, go compare the pricing).

2. S3 response times can vary wildly at times. Use a CDN to avoid this.

And of course feel free to use a cache key instead of invalidating via an API if ~15 minutes it too long to wait for fresh content to appear at edges.

PS Don't apologize for laziness. When directed appropriately, its a most productive force.

My mistake! I assumed you meant the time it takes to fulfil a request and the bandwidth cost were related because they were mentioned in the same sentence.

Agreed on all other counts.

You could also host it on App Engine for free and automatically use Google's CDN.

For free?

GAE doesn't charge for their object store nor their CDN service?

IIRC, the CDN isn't charged separately, and the object store is available (within a certain quota) within the GAE free tier, so, within certain limits, yes, "for free".

There is a free tier. It looks like it's free up to 1GB per day [1].

On my home account I've only used it for demo projects that are scarcely used, but it's fine for that.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas

Does it 'stop' if you reach the quota or do you get a bill?

I don't have any personal experience, but as I understand it, that depends on whether you enabled billing.

Don't you have to provide a CC to sign up for even the free tier? (That's how it was when I was trying it out a couple of years back.) It was really cute too, Google would send me a $0.00 invoice each month.

I don't remember. I've been using it since the beginning and I don't get a bill.

I don't know how up to date this page is, but here's how it used to work: https://sites.google.com/site/gdevelopercodelabs/app-engine/...

If you don't put in your credit card info, it stops. Otherwise you get a bill.

Cloudfront requires JavaScript, which isn't always acceptable.

Edit: Nevermind, confused Cloudfront with Cloudflare. Thanks for the correction, toomuchtodo.

Cloudflare does, Cloudfront (AWS' CDN) does not.

EDIT: cm3: I didn't mean to call you out, just wanted my reply in here for historical context. Its very easy to confuse the two.

No, thanks for correcting me. The names are similar enough and the purpose is too, so it's easy to confuse. I mean, if you hadn't commented, I would have wondered why it got downvoted.

This is untrue for CloudFlare as well. Individual sites may choose to require JavaScript but you can use the service just fine without it.

I don't mind the quibbling, as I've been trying to figure this out myself.

From what I see, S3 is $.09/GB to the Internet, and Cloudfront is $.085/GB to NA/Europe...and $.14/GB for Asia. How is this cheaper?

Cloudfront is slightly cheaper than S3, you'd want to look at non-AWS CDNs to get near 1-5 cents/GB for outbound (Cloudflare, Cachefly, etc).

Yeah I notice that was weird too. The creator speaks a lot about about html optimizations but one of the most widely-used methods of page speed increases are global CDN distribution.

The SSD is really meaningless in this context. The website is so small that it will be loaded almost 100% from the filesystem cache. As long as it has more than 512 MB of ram...

If I wanted my website to load incredibly fast, I would absolutely not put it on an obscure VPS. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with it, but it's generally not going to make your site faster.

the whole thing was obv. created with the intent to promote his affiliate link

Meaningless-weaningless, but that site loaded instantly on my iphone 4-without-s and did not lag, unlike all others (except hn ofc). No CDN can hide modern js freezotrons.

That's because all those other sites are poorly built. It's not because the article's site is a brilliant example of "doing it right".

Putting bare text on the web is always going to be fast. So what. If he presented a real full-featured website with the bells and whistles that people expect today, and made it operate that fast, he'd have something to show. Instead he presents polished garbage.

Wait - what precisely do users demand from your website today? Usually I'm happy to find a website which loads quickly, is clean, and steers me in the direction of whatever I'm trying to find, personally.

My expertise is not marketing so I don't feel I could adequately answer that question but there are plenty of focus group studies which show what sort of UX works best. It's a safe bet that most of the big corporations who are already focus-grouping everything they publish, such as Disney for example, are also using focus groups to design their websites.

They're using split testing, conversion rate optimisation, and bizdev to design their sites. When something appears on a corporate website, it's there to benefit someone in the corporation, not the users (although it might benefit them as a side effect).

His site is at least full-featured article (you can load, scroll and read it, yay). Most sites I open are article sites, and they are rarely full-featured articles, because load/scroll features aren't easily accessible.

Regardless of where on this globe you put your VPS, someone will be accessing it at 1000 ms latency. It doesn't make sense to optimize the browser page load speed to 10 ms, and forget that it takes 600 ms to fetch the data from Asia.

How do you prevent S3 from slashdotting your wallet if your site suddenly gets really popular?

You can setup jobs to run that fire when CloudWatch alerts fire noting that your bill is going up or that your hit rate for certain objects is going way up. I think there's a way to setup billing such that you can't exceed a certain amount in a month but that's a weird situation to try to hard stop charges without deleting everything in your account.

You don't really.

I guess everyone's needs are different, but for me, hardly anyone reads anything I write. If I have a sudden surge in interest in something I wrote, last thing I want is to cut off access to it. Would rather keep paying the infinitesimal amount per page view to keep people reading it.

You can use a CDN like CoralCDN.

The clever internet marketer who set up the page missed a trick!

Instead of the affiliate link to some host no on has heard of,he should have affiliated linked to AWS (if possible) and a CDN. Then he could have added that as a strong feature that helps makes the page so fast?

Has any one dealt with DDoS attack on a static hosting (S3 + Couldfront) set up?

I sometimes fear that if something like this happens the bandwidth bill will be too much to handle for small personal projects. Also it's a pain that AWS doesn't allow one to set hard limits on cloud spending. Yes, they allow to set up some billing alarms, but no hard limits. No guarantee that no matter what, the month's hosting bill will not exceed $10 for this project.

For small personal projects a tiny VPS seems to be safer from this angle. At max a DDoS will cripple the VPS but the hosting bill will stay the same.

If you have been through this, did you get any discounts from AWS for resources being used during DDoS attack or you had to pay the full amount.

GitHub Pages is a 100% free alternative

Or you can use a free hosting: Firebase, Github Pages, Dropbox.

Or even better, Surge.sh.

- A very happy customer.

Been using Surge.sh recently and it's super awesome, but I'm not sure I'd use it for production. Care to elaborate?

I love Surge but they host your site on Digital Ocean... an SSD VPS.

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