[amdixon]

We love Middleman for static sites; curious why you chose to go with a server instead of S3+Cloudfront or Netlify. One of the biggest reasons we use static site generators is the ability to CDN the whole thing, making it dirt cheap and blazing fast.

[champagnepapi]

S3 + cloudfront ftw! Also you can use compression with cloudfront, which makes it that much better.

[elliotec]

I've actually used Netlify numerous times and love it. The simple answer to why I chose to manage my own server was mostly to learn how and have full control.

[kuschku]

> making it dirt cheap and blazing fast.

If you’re using S3+CloudFront, it’s not dirt cheap.

Traffic at AWS is so expensive, at any scale it’s cheaper to roll your own. Significantly.

(For traffic in the EU, that is, in other regions traffic tends to be a lot more expensive)

[kaishiro]

For what you get out of the box with this setup (or Google Cloud Storage + Cloud Load Balancing/CDN) it actually can be "dirt cheap", depending on your business goals/traffic. Just like anything, it depends on what you value/what your time is worth. The pricing difference would need to be several (several) orders of magnitude larger than it is for me to worry about the few dollars a month I'm spending on each static site sitting in S3/Cloud Storage.

Also, if there is an issue with either of these it's far easier for me to justify downtime to a client by saying "Amazon us-east is down, here's Amazon's status page" then trying to explain who OVH is.

[mediascreen]

You would roll your own CDN? I think that setting up a worldwide server network with seamless scaling would involve some work.