Hosting Static Websites on Amazon AWS S3

In the past, I've hosted this blog on site44.com, which works great, is easy to use, and fairly reasonable at $4.95 / mo. However, I wanted to experiment with even cheaper hosting options, which led me to try Amazon S3's static website hosting.

Following the steps on Kyle Galbraith’s excellent article, it took me less than 15 minutes to set up. And it works like a charm!

You can't afford NOT to own your content

I expect S3 hosting to cost less than $20 a year, possibly much less. This is 70% cheaper than running a private VM.

At this price point, there isn't a good reason to publish your content on anyone else's domain. Think about it this way: If you spend more than 2-3 hours a year writing, your time itself is worth far more than the cost of hosting, including domain registration.

At a minimum, $20 a year is worth keeping control over your content and privacy. And if your content does eventually take off, you can scale up and do what you want with it.

It's easier than it looks

The AWS console is much, much more cryptic and technical than it needs to be — reflecting a dev-focused culture. This is a shame, because the tools and processes themselves are very straight-forward. AWS presents a lot of options and flexibility, most of it you can safely ignore for hosting a simple site.

The good news is that there are lots of articles, like the one I used, that walks you through the process, and you only need to do it once.

Related: Tech.