Using Amazon S3 to host a static copy of your site

http://www.cykod.com/blog/post/2009-09-using-s3-to-host-a-static-copy-of-your-site

by edw519 • 17 years ago

34 13 17 years ago

imajes• 17 years ago

better: use some ec2 instances (stock, or custom) and run squid front-proxy. It's just as easy to configure and you get cache sweeping and so on for free.

miracle• 17 years ago

They couldn't charge that much consultancy time then ;)

Sam_Odio• 17 years ago

The advantage is price. If you're running two medium ec2 instances you're going to pay $288/month before bandwidth.

5GB of S3 storage is $0.75/month before bandwidth.

gerrypower• 17 years ago

Do it for free using Google's App Engine and dry drop http://drydrop.binaryage.com/ Here is my test blog running using that setup: blog.innovationpower.ca

rwolf• 17 years ago

What a hilarious abuse of the nice folks at GitHub and GAE! I guess it's the natural progression of those GitHub blogs that have been cropping up...

I'm not saying I won't try it--but I'll feel bad.

gfodor• 17 years ago

Note that from the article they never acutally ran the site off of s3. They copied everything over but the big traffic spike never came.

IMHO, CloudFront would have been a smarter option, we've found that S3 has very volatile latency when serving files directly to end users over HTTP.

byoung2• 17 years ago

Why not just host the site on a scalable platform (Rackspace Cloud, MediaTemple, etc.) to begin with?

jasonkester2• 17 years ago

Why did you skip the final step? You were like 90 seconds away from having it deployed on CloudFront, and thus quickly served anywhere in the world on a real Content Delivery Network.

It would have taken something on the order of one right-click in your S3 organizer of choice, followed by a CNAME record.

S3 has about 300-800ms latency on average. CloudFront's latency is 46ms. (exactly, every single time, 46ms. It's spooky).

So close... and yet so far!

ckinnan• 17 years ago

Additionally, Cloudfront is cheaper than S3!

pjhyett• 17 years ago

Unless I'm missing the sarcasm, you still pay for your S3 usage when you're using CloudFront.

stephenjudkins• 17 years ago

We've gotten consistently sub-100ms latencies from EC2 instances, relatively predictably.

Using Amazon S3 to host a static copy of your site

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