In the era of continuously generated AI content, we can hardly describe the web as static. Yet, Amazon’s “static website” tool seems may be good enough for most.
I’ve collected a couple tools to create static websites on AWS S3, and manage the basic tasks (update SSL certificates, upload files and the like). Want to know why? Read on.
First, even by AWS price standards, static websites on S3 are dirt cheap. They scale with the amount of users, so for a small “experimental” website it might be pennies. This should be compared with the cost of a VPS that is in the 5$/month or so at the cheapest. If the traffic stays small, I have estimated that for around 100kB of data a page, the final cost for a million page loads would be around 10$. Egress fees is about the only cost here.
The other big advantage is scale. Serving a million page loads with a 5$/month VPS can be challenging. The few times by blog had thousands of visitors/hour, WordPress would struggle keeping up. For an S3 bucket however, that’s hardly a problem.
Third, why not; most of my blog viewers would perceive this website as “static” anyway (at least those that don’t leave comments… would you believe this was a thing? Leaving a comment in a website?). I have a feeling that anything that doesn’t need synchronous server-side logic can magically become “static”. Also platform maintenance is greatly simplified.
I’m probably not saying anything new here, but I always think about how much “the cloud” can scale up, without spending a minute thinking how much it can scale down. This is one of those occasions where it does. And actually, I wish it would happen more often.
