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!