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Comment by root993 | Hacker News Reader

Hello, author here.

We definitely considered using other cloud providers like DO, linode, etc. But it was important for us to go with AWS because we needed some of the other services that AWS providers like s3, Route53, etc.

Some of our static websites are in fact hosted entirely using CloudFront + s3 combination which is something I forgot to mention in this post :)

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Hi. Also I think you're future proofing your setup in a great way. There's no limit to what you can build. Also you get the fully fledged networking stack I assume, with VPCs, Security groups and so on.

Very good read, thanks for sharing. Have an upvote.

I haven’t used LightSail myself, so that’s the standard disclaimer. But while you do get a VPC, as long as you are in the Lightsail world, it’s invisible.

Once you graduate to full fledge AWS, you can peer your Lightsail VPC to your full fledge AWS VPC.

I'm not an expert on AWS, but can't you use all those services without AWS?

I'm not sure whether you're confusing AWS for some specific component of AWS, or whether you're just stating that competitors exist for those techs

But for the former: AWS is a whole suite of tools -- the specified technologies (cloudfront, S3, etc) are individual (and mostly decoupled) tools within that suite

Sounds like they are saying that you can have an S3 equivalent and DNS services without being on AWS. Which is true and most of the time less expensive.

One of my many AWS pet hates is that they have a service called Amazon WorkSpaces, i.e. AWS.

If you mean can you use S3 and Route53 etc. while hosting your servers somewhere other than AWS, absolutely - people do that all the time.

However in the Route53 case there are a few automatic integrations that only work with other AWS services. Not that big a deal though.

You can if your company can afford to pay enough to hire an entire devops team in a short time.

Why would you host a static website using s3? What's wrong with a traditional file system? You already have the load balancer.

With block storage (a disk), you are going to need some compute capability to host it. Presumably with S3 you don't need that (I know you can do this with Azure Blob Storage, hosting static content directly; assume it's the same with AWS)

It is the same. S3 alone can host a static website (albeit only over http if you want a custom domain name; you need to add CloudFront [or equivalent] to get https hosting with a valid cert under a custom domain name).

Hosting a static website using S3 can be done dirt-cheap. We were hosting our website on S3 for a while now, with a monthly bill of 1,20€ with CloudFlare CDN in front of our bucket. Another big plus is that you do not have to worry about server administration, load balancers etc.

Just curious, why CloudFlare instead of CloudFront?

I'd assume because CloudFlare doesn't charge anything for bandwidth; so their costs are exceptionally predictable

For a static website isn't something like Netlify easier (and cheaper, as in free)?

100GB bandwidth/month for free, it's quite small traffic.

with caching (eg. cloudflare) in front of s3 hosting for static websites, you have almost zero cost hosting.

because it's super cheap and ridiculously easy

hardest part is working out how to go fully-public fully-static

My website is very small scale. I'm already using S3 to store some other things so hosting the static site on S3 is pretty straightforward. And it costs me literally pennies a month.

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