> AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs
Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.
Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.
People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and how little value it actually has for most people.
You can just drag and drop a folder and have a static site hosted in a few minutes.
A lot of other people also pick it for very narrow use cases where it wouldn't have been that much more time to learn and do it themselves and end up paying a lot of money and also aren't happy
It's pretty nice for mid-size startups to completely ignore performance and capacity planning and be able to quickly churn out features while accumulating tech debt and hoping they make it long enough to pay the tech debt back
Personally, software engineering for me is mostly about trying to avoid accidental complexity. People obsessing about "web scale" and "distributed architecture" before they even figured out if people actually want to use the platform/product/tool they've used tends to add a lot of complexity.
You're welcome to set up the CDN with a CLI...
That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc).
You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets.
I would be with you if this was something complicated to cache where you're server-side templating responses and can't just globally cache things, but for static HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.
While reliability is always some concern, we are talking about a website containing docs for a nerdy tool used by a minuscule percentage of developers. No one will complain if it goes down for 1h daily.
But, honestly, for this: just use github pages. It's OSS and GitHub is already used. They can use a separate repository to host the docs if repo size from assets are a concern (e.g. videos).