Tsk, poor choice on your part. You should have started a side consultancy (get a spouse to own it maybe?) and say that you can do it for a mere £40K.

Then dump the static file on S3, and let the interest from the £40K in your bank account pay for it.

Okay, that sounds pretty cool. S3 can host static HTML files?

Yes, I host my blog that way:

- Generate static files using Pelican

- Dump the files to S3

- Set up Route53 to point a domain at the bucket

- Set up CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) to sit in front of the S3 bucket, since I found pure S3 to be too slow

Works incredibly well.

Why use Amazon for static pages? My github page works just fine.

I believe Amazon is more robust if your website gets hit by a lot of traffic.

keep in mind S3 bandwidth is roughly 20~30x more expensive than a VPS.

I put my photo/video blog on S3 reasoning that it'll handle spikes better. At one point it reached the front page of HN and cost me $450. Afterward I looked at the logs and found that my single $20 linode would have handled it fine...

Definitely depends on your requirements. AWS can indeed charge a bit for bandwidth.

But if you're talking about small static websites, AWS gives you an easy interface, Cloudfront, Route53, etc. It's a very easy way to do some very complex things.

You might also look into billing alarms. I've got some simple background jobs that I run on lambda, pulling some files to S3 every hour. It costs me a buck or two a month. But if it ever looks like it might charge me $20, it will alarm and email me.

I assume you mean data transfer rather than bandwidth, but an often overlooked factor nonetheless.

How much does all this cost you per month?

Probably about 10 cents.

For some reason that feels like cheating on a test but it's brilliant nevertheless. I think I'll try it with the 15 local corner shop sites that I'm hosting out of the goodness of my heart. Thanks!

Yes. Works quite well and can handle quite a bit of load. Some native support within Route 53 helps make setting it up easy.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/static...

> though I might have got into trouble with the Change Prevention Board for not using the right form or something...

The "or something" and "which I ignored" aren't making you look like the reasonable actor in these interactions

Sounds reasonable to me to save the company £70K. But I'm not a manager, so what would I know.

I doubt it was a mission-critical single static html page.

edit: £70K plus the cost of installation/hardware support/etc/etc.

The poster

  - "ignored ... a carefully worked out explanation"
  - doesn't (or doesn't care enough to) understand the company's established processes ("...or something")

Given that s/he thus didn't (couldn't) relate these in his/her telling of the story, there's at least the possibility that what's missing is less flattering or even completely contradictory to their telling.

Just as we can all point to examples of process absurdity, we can all point to examples of

  - failures because process didn't exist
  - companies with good process

At the very least, from an objective standpoint, the poster's telling of the story reflects poorly on them

I guess I'm not objective then because the only fact I need is "£70K to host a single static webpage on an internal network".

£70K to host one static webpage is not a good process or "carefully worked out explanation" any way you cut it.

More likely he just didn't want to do it.

>Change Prevention Board

Haha, ours is called "Change Management", but they would more correctly be called "Change Prevention", or "Sanity Obstruction".