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Comment by crazypython | Hacker News Reader

An S3 bucket is intended as storage, not retrieval. Downloading from S3 means grabbing shards. You should put a proper CDN, like CloudFront or Cloudflare, in front.

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Pfffffft. It’s probably a personal site with 10 visitors a week. Let’s step back a little here.

Let's be real here.

He clearly needs kubernetes.

Hahahaha

This is correct. Why would I put any more effort into it?

Cloudflare at minimum it's free as well and will protect you from bad actors which will save you $ if someone starts an infinite loop requesting your site.

And 9 of them are just bots.

> You should put a proper CDN, like CloudFront or Cloudflare, in front.

I understand what you're saying, but why? I assume the site in question is pretty low volume. What's wrong with serving directly from S3?

You can't get https on S3. Also many interesting headers are only available via cloudfront.

Also you get a little bit of protection from someone sending lots of traffic to make you spend $$$

S3 does not support gzip compression.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26600816

You can generally query any object off s3 in a few milliseconds..

I have a system doing 10s-100's of millions of reads a day from s3 with very consistent and fast read times.

Why, if his monthly bill is 83 cents, and he values his time? Does not using a CDN impact performance in a crippling way that neither me nor the poster you're replying to understands?

The big gain with putting Cloudfront in front of it is you can have HTTPS.

HTTPS gets you better SEO and the ability to be iframe'd from HTTPS sites.

And some security.

And loose 30 mins of your life you’ll never get back. It’s just a person site.

Browsers will light up like a christmas tree if your site doesn't have https.

Performance maybe a little bit, but IIRC you, as the owner of the bucket, pay for bandwidth out.

Putting it being a CDN protects you (at least a little bit) from the possibility of a huge bandwidth bill at the end of the month if someone realizes they can attack your wallet directly by trying to ddos your site.

I agree– AWS bandwidth out is literally 100 times more expensive than CDN and VPN bandwidth out.

indeed, not to mention generous bandwidth rates on vps providers too

*VPS

It takes like 30 seconds to point a Cloudfront distribution at an S3 bucket. Maybe a couple minutes more to set up the domain.

Eh, only if you've done it before. If it's your first time, it can easily take 30 mins to an hour, if you also have to figure out how to host the website on Route 53.

Well, sure, but every suggestion is going to take some time if you've never done it before. It's not like it's an obscure skill that you'll never use, it's pretty handy to know.

I don't think it matters much b/c of the super low volume but I do have it behind Cloudflare free-tier.

> Does not using a CDN impact performance in a crippling way that neither me nor the poster you're replying to understands?

It adds up to 600ms of latency for each roundtrip. A modern website without link rel=preload is several roundtrips– download HTML page, then do JS requests and CSS, so that's ~1.2s of additional latency.

Because he succumbed to AWS' marketing. Surge, mentioned downthread, lets you deploy a folder for free on a worldwide CDN with virtually no setup.

I agree, S3 is only storage. S3 even does not support gzip compression.

If you are hosting a website in s3, please put a CDN with gzip support in front.

You can use CloudFront with an S3-backed static website.

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