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by DiabloD3 217 days ago
Far more expensive than just having a dumb server somewhere at some normal host.

People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and how little value it actually has for most people.

3 comments

It's really a tradeoff of saving time by paying more money. A lot of people chose it when they'd rather not pay more money and end up unhappy

A lot of other people also pick it for very narrow use cases where it wouldn't have been that much more time to learn and do it themselves and end up paying a lot of money and also aren't happy

It's pretty nice for mid-size startups to completely ignore performance and capacity planning and be able to quickly churn out features while accumulating tech debt and hoping they make it long enough to pay the tech debt back

A year ago I researched this topic for a static website of my own. All providers I looked at were $5 and I want to say the cheapest I found was slightly lower. By comparison, I am still within free tier limits of AWS S3 and cloudfront (CDN) since I am not getting much traffic. So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free, but if I host on a single server in Ohio it costs $5/month.
Did you check NearlyFreeSpeech.net? If you are getting little traffic it costs practically nothing for a static site.
An idle site that receives no hits still costs around $1.50/month with NearlyFreeSpeech.net since the change that limits the number of "non-production" sites that was instituted from around the time when Cloudflare decided to kick out the white supremacists.
Thank you! That did not come up in my search, but it looks great and is reasonably priced. I may use that for another project.
Most people will never make it past the free tier on any of CloudFront, Cloudflare, Netlify, Render, etc.

You can just drag and drop a folder and have a static site hosted in a few minutes.