Show HN: Hosting my WordPress blog entirely on Amazon S3 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hosting my WordPress blog entirely on Amazon S3

slowping.com

39 pointsiqster11 comments

Holy cow, $60/month for one VPS strictly used for educational projects? You can find and build 10 VPS's (US based) on http://www.lowendbox.com for less than that, granted you wont be on Amazon's network, but for small projects and testing distributed services they are great.

A $15/month micro would likely have sufficed, and you can get that down to about $8/month with a reserved instance.

An EC2 t1.micro instance costs considerably less than that and it makes a perfectly decent host for one or more low-traffic blogs.

On the other hand, hosting a blog on S3 means that it can scale to handle any conceivable amount of traffic.

Nice hack.

However you really should look into static website generators such as Jekyll, Octopress or Hyde. They provide a much cleaner interface for that kind of stuff.

Octopress is great but quite slow (minutes for a 'rake generate') for anything over the trivial level.

I'm a big fan of Mynt (http://mynt.mirroredwhite.com/) - it's very simple and easy to understand, but is powerful enough to do just about anything you need.

Interesting hack. Werner Vongels, CTO of Amazon, wrote about how he did a similar thing, hosting his blog (albeit not a Wordpress one)on S3:

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/Jekyll-amazon-s3...

Why not host it on a mini-vps with the wordpress install but use supercache and force it to always use the "logged out" copy (and don't allow registered users).

Then it bypasses wordpress and php entirely via htaccess and becomes entirely static.

Hm, the search should be 'fixed' too. That, along with getting rid of most plugins, and the comments, means that WordPress is only retained for its moderate flexibility and admin interface.

As people say, static generators along with a small toolkit of your own will probably produce better results. But what is proposed is a compromise between an already started job and a good cost-scalability ratio, though…

Cool but the URL structure seems crappy from an SEO standpoint. I wonder if there's any flexibility there when generating static files from WP.

important note: you are not hosting a wordpress blog on s3. you are hosting a static dump of files on s3. move along. nothing to see here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com