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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

As someone said in the comments, just keep in mind that S3 is just for storage, not serving. You'll need something like CloudFront for that, although I don't know at which degree of activity it's going to save you money to use it. Maybe from the get-go?

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Actually, this comment is correct.

S3 may indeed serve it using Static Website Hosting (and you need to enable it anyway to use CloudFront with it).

Still, S3 is quite slow, and not globally distributed. It's indeed good advice and practice to use CloudFront in front of it.

CloudFront for a static website not very expensive either.

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I run my company's website runs off of S3 + CloudFront, and S3 alone is slow.

Load time is usually 2x to 3x when accessed via the S3 origin

S3 will cheerfully serve it -

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

As has already been mentioned, S3 can indeed serve static websites and has had this capability for at least a year now.

That's completely false. Hosting a static website on S3 is very well documented.

yes but the recommended approach is to put CloudFront in front of it, if you care about performance at all

I think the point of their post, is that this is their "oh shit we are down" setup, which will consist of a small static site that S3 will happily serve up to anyone anywhere in the world very quickly. This isn't meant to be a full wack highly performant copy of their existing website fronted by CDN's.

And how reliable is it?

There have been reports about S3 returning 50x errors, when (as documented) the client should retry. A browser is not an S3 client, so it won't retry ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4976893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4977360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4981482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2897959

But that's wrong. You don't need anything else, S3 is for serving, and they deliberately added support and documentation for exactly this use case: hosting static websites.

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