Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS

AWS and the like make a killing from the basic fact that most web devs don't know anything about the real costs of bandwidth (a blind spot, if you will).

HE.net is currently advertising 10gig ethernet for $1300/mo. Obviously there are various scaling issues associated with this but the basic premise still holds - AWS and other cloud services need major pressure to push their bandwidth prices down.

I'm surprised no one is mentioning Netlify in the comments.

I have set up some sites the same way, the only ugly part for me was that I wanted to use the features of S3 web hosting interface, but restrict all traffic to come through CloudFront. This blog post (not mine) describes the problem and the approach: https://abridge2devnull.com/posts/2018/01/restricting-access...

GAE is far better than AWS for static sites. No cost for medium scale static websites (50,000 pageviews/day), CDN built-in.

Right now, I am hosting my personal site and blog on S3 + Cloudflare for 6 cents / month. I use Middleman, because I feel that it offers more flexibility than Hugo.

Spaces + BunnyCDN is even cheaper. ;)

$6/month = 250GB of static websites + domain registration fees.

If you want to get really cheap, OVH's cloud storage is basically free but you lose https. ($.01/GB of traffic/storage roughly)

Why not Github pages? Has anyone measured performance? CDN is always an option you can add on top, if you don't like Github's one.

Does this require invalidating the main page in cloudfronts CDN when you add a blog post or article?

Cost-comparisons aside, the massive speed improvement makes me think he didn't have caching configured correctly with Cloudflare and his PHP backend (thus defeating the entire point of the CDN aspect).

I'm guessing a couple of Cache-Control: headers would have provided similar latency improvements.

why can't he use the free cloudflare?

A static website cached by cloudflare seems very vanilla.

Also, why S3? this seems very easy to do with Linode or anything else similarly cheap or cheaper ($20 gets you a KVM VPS with 2 Gb nowadays)

Unless you have to regenerate constantly, all it needs is nginx, to serve the pages to Cloudflare edges when thry drop out of the cache