[brazzy]

If your site is entirely static content and mostly text, you don't really need a CDN. I've had a static site survive the HN frontpage without any problem on cheap-ass shared hosting.

[challengee]

Correct. But availability of cheap-ass shared hosting will be nowhere near that of S3+Cloudfront.

Additionaly, S3 and Cloudfront are extremely cheap themselves. And you get a few nice bonusses (like low latency, everywhere).

[untog]

If all you need is static hosting then S3 is great. The benefits of a CDN, and it's incredibly cheap too.

[danielhughes]

If you want the benefits of a CDN I think you'd have to link S3 to CloudFront. S3 alone does not provide CDN capabilities AFAIK.