[emforce]

I was previously using Cloudflare in conjunction with a Linode server. The disadvantage of this, however, is that you need to ensure that one server never goes down otherwise anyone hitting a cold cache would see the site down.

Also, why do you need a server at all? If you are doing nothing but serving static files then why incur the overhead of maintaining LetsEncrypt certificates and writing Nginx config files? AWS provides a simple interface in which you can view and manage your static files without having to ssh into a server.

On the point of price, I'm predicting my total cost of hosting for a site serving roughly 40-45k users per month will be roughly $7/month. All whilst minimizing the amount of administration time required and monitoring of a more traditional system.

Hope this clarifies this, would be keen to hear any counter thoughts!

[partiallypro]

We use Azure and we have multiple sites we're getting that visitor count (or more, for PPC campaigns) for way less than $7/mo using Cloudflare/Azure Edge/Web Apps. This might not work for a single site, but multiple sites on a service plan we can handle way more visits per site (especially if it were static) for $2-$3/site/mo and we could auto scale if needed though that would raise that number, it would not exceed your number. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see how $7 isn't viewed as rather expensive for that visitor count.

[1996]

Sure! here are my counter thoughts: What if your site changes every 5 minutes, and is about 100Mb?

12x24x100= lots of mb per day

S3 costs (if only for the bandwidth) will be greater than a server with a fair share unlimited connection

Also, cloudfront non free plans will kill you - again because of the bandwith.

[giobox]

> What if your site changes every 5 minutes, and is about 100Mb?

This is probably an exceptional rate of change for the _vast_ majority of static sites.

[bigpicture]

> This is probably an exceptional rate of change for the _vast_ majority of static sites.

I also doubt that many static sites have much "overhead" related to maintaining nginx config files and Let's Encrypt certificates.

[outworlder]

Sure, but then there's the whole overhead of maintaining a server.

[ramses0]

Clarify this: "The difference between zero servers and one server is much larger than the difference between 100 servers and 101 servers"

The person you're talking to is likely thinking of the "100=>101" case, not the "0=>1" case.

[1996]

Maintaining a server is not complicated nowadays, with ansible. I have a few dozens, some of them don't need any admin for years (like linode), the others have debian testing and ansible to deploy matching configurations and keep up with the updates