Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.
No. S3, like most AWS services, has uncapped costs. If you experience higher than expected load, such as a DDoS attempt, you'll burn through the preallocated spend and you'll still get a bill afterward.
This doesn't appear to actually shut down the resources once the preallocated spend is exhausted. Its just a way to pay for bills preemptively instead of when you receive them. Its an accounting thing, not a new feature.
I think you could, yes. It’s a different question as to how fast you’d hit the limit, but definitely possible to do a “this site can only have 100000 visits” type art project.
I've also been thinking about that! I wonder if https://archive.org/web/ is an alternative though, as in could I pay them so they could mirror it for a 100 years?
I would absolutely love to be able to donate a domain name to the Internet Archive plus a lump sum cash donation and have them keep it hosted in perpetuity.
Sign me up too, I've got a (very small) site that I would like to outlive me; my plan is to attempt to set it up with a large balance at NearlyFreeSpeach.net and also put the account identifier in an HTML comment so that motivated people could increase its balance in the future.
I would be very interested in other credible perpetual hosting plans.
You'd probably be better off signing up for an Oracle Always-Free tier as there's no billing information stored should anything run into costs. But as the name implies, it's always free, so your performance, bandwidth and space allocation is substantially lower than the paid options.
Yes, but no. You could pre-pay for the next 100 years, but there’s no guarantee you would get 100 years of service. Nothing stopping AWS increasing prices during that period, and you’d be subject to those increases just like everyone else.
This doesn't appear to actually shut down the resources once the preallocated spend is exhausted. Its just a way to pay for bills preemptively instead of when you receive them. Its an accounting thing, not a new feature.