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Comment by hagy | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. For an entirely static website, I can't see any reason not to host content in cloud storage and serve through a CDN (e.g., CloudFront or Cloudflare). You get the advantage of low cost when running at low volume and the ability to scale up as needed.

Further, your users will get lower latency and faster downloads when accessing one of the globally-distributed edge caches. And lastly, you don't have to expose your own IP address, which puts at risk of DDoS.

Does anyone have a good argument for self-hosting an entirely static website?

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It's more fun. You have complete control and you learn more. It's like building a Morse code key from spare parts rather than buying one from the store.

Having said that, I think NearlyFreeSpeech provides a great web hosting service for pennies a day for those who don't want to host at home. I've used them for years. https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing

It's more fun for me trying to host a site on S3 and I get to learn more about AWS in general. My goal is to have a site that costs a dollar a month baseline and even if something goes viral the expected bill can never be more than $10-20

Yes and no. The classic adage of "what if" tends to fly into these conversations prematurely.

Let's face facts. Most personal sites won't see a giant boost in traffic unexpectedly. Which means hosting and paying a cloud provider is completely unnecessary.

If you happen to become popular enough (the 1%) THEN you start to consider some scaling patterns.

There have been enough articles about people getting surprise AWS bills going into the thousands of dollars. Even as someone doing business with some of my sites that's a risk I'm not willing to take. It's definitely not an option for someone wanting to minimize costs to an extreme by not spending money on a hoster at all. The simple step of having to provide a credit card for AWS without being able to set a limit is not an acceptable risk.

I don't want to make my visitors more trackable than absolutely necessary. Sure, my ISP and their ISP will know that they connected to me, but not to which site thanks to TLS. If I host on CloudFront, Amazon knows exactly which pages they viewed at which time because they can see inside the TLS connection.

> ...but not to which site thanks to TLS.

Are you sure?

> The desired hostname is not encrypted, so an eavesdropper can see which site is being requested. [0]

ESNI is meant to fix this but isn't, yet, widely deployed (AFAIK).

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Having just moved some of my static sites to S3+Cloudfront, I think the main reason to self-host would be self-education. AWS is great, but it's quite opaque compared to having your stuff right there on a box you can poke at.

There's also a distinct vendor portability advantage. If you want to move your self-hosted static site from your home connection somewhere else, it's pretty straightforward. But if I want to move my static sites from Amazon to some other cloud vendor, I basically have to start my Terraform from scratch.

> For an entirely static website, I can't see any reason not to host content in cloud storage and serve through a CDN

Caring about the privacy of your readers.

Are you accusing Amazon of snooping into traffic going to their AWS customers? Seems quite a charge, and I hope you have evidence. If not, it doesn't look well for someone purportedly good at web development to propose such a silly hypothesis.

I have plenty of evidence. Most companies keep logs and make the available to law enforcement. In countries different than the user accessing the data.

On top of that, the Snowden revelations.

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