Using Amazon S3 to host a static copy of your site | Hacker News Reader

Using Amazon S3 to host a static copy of your site

cykod.com

34 pointsedw51913 comments

Why did you skip the final step? You were like 90 seconds away from having it deployed on CloudFront, and thus quickly served anywhere in the world on a real Content Delivery Network.

It would have taken something on the order of one right-click in your S3 organizer of choice, followed by a CNAME record.

S3 has about 300-800ms latency on average. CloudFront's latency is 46ms. (exactly, every single time, 46ms. It's spooky).

So close... and yet so far!

Additionally, Cloudfront is cheaper than S3!

Unless I'm missing the sarcasm, you still pay for your S3 usage when you're using CloudFront.

As I understand it not every request will hit S3, only cache misses on the edge servers.

"Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your files. Normal fees will apply for Amazon S3 usage, including “origin fetches” – data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge locations."

All together, it comes in as a little less than double the cost of S3 alone. Here are a my observed numbers (for cost and performance, respectively):

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2009/01/cloudfront-cos...

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-per...

We've gotten consistently sub-100ms latencies from EC2 instances, relatively predictably.

Do it for free using Google's App Engine and dry drop http://drydrop.binaryage.com/ Here is my test blog running using that setup: blog.innovationpower.ca

What a hilarious abuse of the nice folks at GitHub and GAE! I guess it's the natural progression of those GitHub blogs that have been cropping up...

I'm not saying I won't try it--but I'll feel bad.

Note that from the article they never acutally ran the site off of s3. They copied everything over but the big traffic spike never came.

IMHO, CloudFront would have been a smarter option, we've found that S3 has very volatile latency when serving files directly to end users over HTTP.

better: use some ec2 instances (stock, or custom) and run squid front-proxy. It's just as easy to configure and you get cache sweeping and so on for free.

They couldn't charge that much consultancy time then ;)

The advantage is price. If you're running two medium ec2 instances you're going to pay $288/month before bandwidth.

5GB of S3 storage is $0.75/month before bandwidth.

Why not just host the site on a scalable platform (Rackspace Cloud, MediaTemple, etc.) to begin with?

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