[nsporillo]

The last time I tried to maintain a personal VPS I was using it for a Jenkins build server so users could obtain the latest artifacts of some open source programs I work on. That burned me after it got exploited using a Jenkins RCE and a bitcoin miner was installed on the VPS.

Also, the cheapest VPS you can find likely won't ever achieve the level of scale your static website in S3 could achieve. In the rare event you get a lot of web traffic, you're only hosed if AWS is hosed.

[capableweb]

You gotta receive a ton of traffic for Nginx to stop serving static files. I'm pretty sure most of the static websites today could survive on a lite Nginx vps with minimal tuning.

Also, i rather have my server go down than to receive a larger bill from aws, but that all depends on your use case obviously

[nsporillo]

Yeah this is probably true, I've never actually had a nginx instance be overwhelmed myself. I just don't know how much I trust VPS providers that aren't charging a premium $5+/month to deliver quality reliable performance.

The best part of S3 + Route53 is your costs are basically constant. $.50 a month for the hosted zone and then you pay pennies on the dollar for GBs of data transfer. In theory your bill could balloon if you had a hefty static website or some big files left public in your buckets and someone constantly downloaded it.

[eli]

S3 isn’t actually that great at serving a ton of traffic without a CDN in front of it