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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the costs are like. Just looking at the S3 page, it seems this would actually be rather cheap, which makes it an attractive option (especially for a student like me :P). However, I'm not entirely certain on how much resources a small blog like this would use, so I don't know exactly how expensive it would be.

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I run my blog off an EC2 Micro instance running Apache, which Amazon conveniently offers a free year of service for. (And it's not expensive paying for it yourself either ($69/yr for a Small). I used to use HostGator, AWS is much nicer--apart from outgoing emails, but once you're set up you're good.)

Pingdom is kind of nifty for its comparisons. I got the author's site to be only in the top 97% by running the benchmark again. My own site varies from being in the top 90% to 96% (I did get a 99% once), the only real "optimization" I do is reading cached pages from "disk" (EBS is notoriously pretty slow). I could probably shave off an average 100ms with some really simple tricks. Under heavy load I'm certain I'd fall over on such a puny machine that isn't even using nginx+memcached.

> Pingdom is kind of nifty for its comparisons. I got the author's site to be only in the top 97% by running the benchmark again. My own site varies from being in the top 90% to 96% (I did get a 99% once)

If you strive for geek cred, you can get

> Your website is faster than 100% of all tested websites

The trick is to 1. have a static website, obviously, and everything inlined (so basically a single index.html); 2. run the test twice — dns responses should cache during the first one; 3. host your website in Amsterdam which is where they have (at least one of) their testers:

> Tested from Amsterdam, Netherlands on October 16 at 19:04:21

Oh, and don't use SSL.

According to the pricing page [1], a reserved Small is $69/yr plus $0.039 for any hour the instance is running, which could add up to another $341 for the year.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Good catch, I just quickly glanced at the figure without remembering the hourly rates still apply. Going with the yearly-reserved Micro you're at $128 for the year, which is a bit more than many shared hosts but at least you have absolute power over the software.

Just for a Jekyll blog, you could just host it on a free Heroku instance with an Nginx server and put CloudFlare in front of it.

In a free Heroku instance you have a lot of juice actually, especially for an Nginx server, the only problem being that the instance will go in idle mode after an hour of inactivity and so unlucky visitors can get some latency on the first request, although it's not that awful.

On the other hand CloudFlare is a pretty good proxy that works like a CDN, so with the right caching headers set, CloudFlare will serve many requests from its own cache.

Check out Amazon's pricing pages ([1] and [2]) for details.

As for resources spent, my own blog has had just over 10k pageviews since Saturday when I launched on S3/CF and for that I'm paying $0.07 (S3) + $0.12 (CF) = a whooping $0.19! Including a lot of writing files back and forth to get everything up and running.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

This is what a bill for my blog with some hundreds or few thousands of hits looks like: http://pygm.us/s6mFV+OP. This is solely S3.

Aside from being unable to figure out a anti-hotlink bucket policy, S3 is great and basically free in most for most blogs.

The blog: http://pygm.us/q6Nv3lja.

Wow, that's awesome.

Of course it's still literally infinitely larger than my current income :P. (I'm abusing the word "infinitely" horribly, but so be it.)

I think I'm almost definitely going to go the S3 route when I get around to redoing my site and starting a blog. (One day...)

I do this for my little personal website.

The key downside to hosting directly on S3 is it only does static pages. So it'll be manual HTML or a static-html-generating-tool like Octopress - none of this fancy dynamic content.

If you're happy with this constraint, hosting on S3 works pretty well for me.

I'm actually very happy with that constraint: I think something statically generated would be perfect for my goals and much simpler to use, understand and customize than something like Wordpress. The only thing to miss would be comments, but I was planning to use something like Diqus for that anyhow. (I will start a blog, one of these days :P.)

Also, almost anything would be an improvement over my current setup which is using PHP on Apache to do what a static compiler would do much better. All I really want is a way to factor my website and reduce code duplication.

Good to hear it's working well for you.

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