Host Your Static Website on Amazon S3

[petercooper]

Couple this with tools like Jekyll or nanoc (with JavaScript-powered comments, perhaps) and you can easily roll out powerful static sites that are dynamic locally. I can see this getting a lot of use because it makes it so easy to rig up new sites right from the shell. It was already pretty easy but the ability to create a new "site" by merely creating a bucket on S3 reduces the friction even more.

(Perhaps too easy, even.. Rig up a domain registration API, content generator, and an S3 uploader and you could have a script pumping out auto-generated "content" sites all day without any hassles right from your terminal window.)

[Smerity]

I think for many personal websites Jekyll[1] style static website generation is going to become very popular. Previously you were always limited by a few dynamic parts of your site such as comments, newsletter registration and questionnaires but now between services like Disqus, MailChimp and Google Docs, you really don't need to pay for any of that anymore. All the dynamic parts of your site are external.

The only cost now is hosting the website at S3 and those costs are substantially lower than competitors. NearlyFreeSpeech[2] is the closest web host to S3 that I can think of and their prices for storage are $10/GB ($0.01 per megabyte month) whilst S3 starts at $0.140 per GB. If your site gets hit incredibly heavily Amazon S3 will also handle the load transparently. If you find that your site is becoming popular in Europe or Asia than it's also supremely easy to push your site from S3 to CloudFront.

I wonder how far you can take this though? How complex a site can you set up using only static hosting and external dynamic services like Disqus, MailChimp and Docs?

[1] https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki [2] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting

[EDIT] As TeHCrAzY said I ovestated the cost of bandwidth transfer but whilst bandwidth falls rapidly it still falls slower than S3 (at ~10TB of transfer it approaches S3's starting price). More importantly I realised I undestated the cost of storage - it's $10/GB and not $1/GB making it closer to 100 times more expensive than S3.

[callmeed]

Yeah but there's still a 100 bucket limit on accounts. That makes it hard if you want to extend this to a product of some sort.

[joshkaufman]

I'm in the process of converting from Wordpress to Jekyll right now. This announcement made me VERY happy.

[petervandijck]

Pumping out content sites is easy enough. Terminal window would actually be a barrier to entry there :)

[bigiain]

You've been able to do this for a while now with CloudFront serving your S3 buckets - I'd suggest the few extra cents per month for the CloudFront CDN service is probably a better way of managing static Amazon hosted sites...

(curiously, the domain name I experimented with this on late last year is strangely appropriate here: http://www.damhik.com/ )

[sharth]

That's not entirely true. With cloudfront, you were able to set that when you goto http://example.com that it would send you to http://example.com/index.html. However, it would not support you when you accessed http://example.com/dir/. That would not redirect to http://example.com/dir/index.html.

[juddlyon]

That sound you hear is the collective groan from every oversold cheapo shared hosting company owner.

Unlimited hosting for 5 bucks? How's world class with a CDN for 45 cents?

[pjscott]

Plus, Amazon doesn't say "unlimited" and then turn around and say "haha oops there are pretty low limits after all!" when you get Slashdotted. Their pricing is transparent. The cheapo shared static hosting providers are now officially the living dead.

[ez77]

Sorry if I sound naive about the term 'unlimited' here, but what are the implications of your comments [1]? I see that S3 does not offer a flat-fee, 'unlimited' model at all [2]. In fact, if my math is right 5 bucks only gives you $5/($0.1/GB) = 50GB of data transfer (forgetting about the other costs).

Edit: I didn't see the 'data in' vs. 'data out'. I think it's actually worse: the first 1GB out free, and 33.33GB extra at $0.150/GB. So 5 bucks doesn't quite give you 35GB!

[1] My guess is that with this 'unlimited' you'll never get even close to 50GB of monthly data transfer.

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

[jonstjohn]

Are cheap static sites really that big of a break-through? Whether a site is 50 cents a month through Amazon or $20/month for dozens through Linode (with the option of non-static), doesn't seem to matter that much to me when most people spend well over $20/week for coffee. The lowest-paid programmer in the US can make $20 in an hour. Anyways, love all the services that Amazon puts out and this is definitely a nice option, but I don't see it as exciting news on an individual basis. Anybody agree?

[pdx]

Agreed. I think it's less about cost, and more about scaling. Not to have to worry about scaling is interesting.

[michaelbuckbee]

I think is this bigger news than it seems as this enables many other new services to now be built on top of S3.

[petervandijck]

Yep. Just wait until Dave Winer gets going with this :)

[mleonhard]

It's still impossible to host the root domain of your website on S3/CloudFront or serve it through an EC2 Elastic Load Balancer.

www.mycompany.com - OK mycompany.com - needs an EC2 instance and Elastic IP

This is because the only way to point your domain at Amazon is with a CNAME record and DNS does not support default CNAME records. It can only work if you add your CNAME record to the 'com.' top-level domain, which is impossible. See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=32044

[speleding]

That is easily solved by doing a permanent redirect (301) from mycompany.com to www.mycompany.com. Many DNS providers such as Godaddy.com have a free redirect service just for that purpose.

[Supermighty]

And this will be one big reason why I wont move any of my sites there. I prefer non-www to www.

[petervandijck]

May I say "awesome" and "finally"? That's awesome. Finally.

[moe]

I'd like to reinforce the "finally". This has been requested on the AWS forums for years.

However, the fact that AWS crushes entire business models with every move they make relativizes their slow pace somewhat.

[pjscott]

Speaking of finally, I wonder when they're going to add proper support for "Content-Encoding: gzip". Last I checked, people would upload gzipped content and add the Content-Encoding header on top, which is inconvenient and doesn't support browsers that can't handle gzipped responses.

[bobf]

So, who is going to be the first person to create a new static hosting provider built on top of S3?

[StavrosK]

Or use App Engine and get pretty URLs, stats, etc as well:

https://github.com/stochastic-technologies/static-appengine-...

[lazyjeff]

Do they also give you the server logs? e.g. access.log

[boctor]

Yes, s3 buckets let you specify a bucket for logging and they include things you'd expect like IP address, referrer: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Server...

[newobj]

s3 has provided access logs for a long time.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Server...

[todd3834]

So now you could build a pretty serious web application with frameworks like Backbone.js and host it for pennies, very cool.

[sudonim]

I ported my site to jekyll last night and moved to S3 for hosting. Then I realized that my .htaccess file wouldn't work so I couldn't redirect some links I wanted to keep.

I'm mostly a product guy, and the entire experience of setting up jekyll was exhilarating.

S3 was pretty easy to set up for hosting.

http://iamnotaprogrammer.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws....

But, I moved the site back to linode for htaccess to work. http://iamnotaprogrammer.com

[delackner]

Maybe this is a good place to ask about an idea I've been toying with, but I'm not sure about the security implications of.

I have an app that generates user content, little chunks of audio. I don't want to get into running some server infrastructure just to let users share their content on facebook/twitter/... so what about letting the app upload an html file to an s3 bucket, with the data embedded in the file and a bit of javascript for an audio player UI? Practical?

[StavrosK]

If the html file is self-contained, sure. Basically, if you can serve it from a static directory and have it work, it'll work on S3.

[nfriedly]

http://sociablelabs.com has been doing this for a little while now and I've been pretty happy with the performance,

[cvk]

This could be useful if your site has an extended outage one day. Create a bucket called "mysite.com" and another called "www.mysite.com" and put your failwhale page in it (set to be the root page). If your site goes down and you know it will be down for an extended period (ouch), you can change your domain's DNS entries to point to s3.amazonaws.com. Then at least your customers will have an explanation.

[laktek]

It would be great if someone could build a routing service (ala .htaccess on the cloud), so that we can make use of S3 without breaking the URLs.

[nivertech]

How's www.mydomain.com vs. mydomain.com handled?

Do I need to create two S3 buckets with duplicated content?

[todd3834]

Its pretty easy to redirect mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com (or the other way around) through your domain registrar these days.

[corin_]

This is awesome, but there is one thing I wish could be changed.

I currently host my (Jekyll-powered) site with S3/CloudFront. The error pages is awesome, but it only works if accessed through S3, not CloudFront.

[JoachimSchipper]

The article talks about custom 4xx error pages - what more do you need?

[davidcann]

This is perfect for auto-scaled hosting a Cappuccino app, so the server cluster can be focused only on the backend.