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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

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.

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).

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