- Generate static files using Pelican
- Dump the files to S3
- Set up Route53 to point a domain at the bucket
- Set up CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) to sit in front of the S3 bucket, since I found pure S3 to be too slow
Works incredibly well.
I put my photo/video blog on S3 reasoning that it'll handle spikes better. At one point it reached the front page of HN and cost me $450. Afterward I looked at the logs and found that my single $20 linode would have handled it fine...
But if you're talking about small static websites, AWS gives you an easy interface, Cloudfront, Route53, etc. It's a very easy way to do some very complex things.
You might also look into billing alarms. I've got some simple background jobs that I run on lambda, pulling some files to S3 every hour. It costs me a buck or two a month. But if it ever looks like it might charge me $20, it will alarm and email me.