[cauterized]

Setting up a server has a sufficient learning curve to significantly delay a project launch for someone who's new to the task.

Configuring such a server to be performant and secure, and keeping the kernel and all relevant packages patched is another learning curve. It's also a major time-sink for a small or one-person team, and even more impactful if this is a side project.

A full server is also totally unnecessary if all you're serving is a static site.

Is all that stuff worth learning? Probably. If you're a technologist. If you're interested in web development rather than trying to advertise your mobile apps. Or if your time has no value.

But if you're just trying to get a static site hosted as quickly and inexpensively as possible, a $5/mo cPanel shared hosting account plus something like Cloudflare may be a MUCH better use of your time and resources.

[Kalium]

You're right! For sophisticated needs like running a server, it's not reasonable to expect a random nontechnical person to take on all that education.

This person clearly knows enough to be aware that they have good options for hosting a static site without ever having to admin a server. Frankly the simple S3+CloudFront+Route53 setup can be done in an hour or less following lots of clearly written documents that don't require one to be a seasoned sysadmin. And it'll cost less than $2/mo.

[cauterized]

You're right. Though frankly, the S3 and cloudfront docs are terrible - especially if you're not already highly familiar with the services and Amazons offerings in general, but even if you are. They don't give nearly enough context or definitions of terms.

I haven't been particularly impressed by any blog posts on the topic either. What resources specifically would you recommend to someone new to the stack?

[Kalium]

AWS has a pretty good doc for this specific case, actually - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website...

But this is decent too - https://www.lambrospetrou.com/articles/migrate-to-aws-static...