[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.