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 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).
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.
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