Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS

Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by emforce on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @01:29PM (#17767913)

I was previously using Cloudflare in conjunction with a Linode server. The disadvantage of this, however, is that you need to ensure that one server never goes down otherwise anyone hitting a cold cache would see the site down.

Also, why do you need a server at all? If you are doing nothing but serving static files then why incur the overhead of maintaining LetsEncrypt certificates and writing Nginx config files? AWS provides a simple interface in which you can view and manage your static files without having to ssh into a server.

On the point of price, I'm predicting my total cost of hosting for a site serving roughly 40-45k users per month will be roughly $7/month. All whilst minimizing the amount of administration time required and monitoring of a more traditional system.

Hope this clarifies this, would be keen to hear any counter thoughts!

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by partiallypro on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @06:25PM (#17770283)

We use Azure and we have multiple sites we're getting that visitor count (or more, for PPC campaigns) for way less than $7/mo using Cloudflare/Azure Edge/Web Apps. This might not work for a single site, but multiple sites on a service plan we can handle way more visits per site (especially if it were static) for $2-$3/site/mo and we could auto scale if needed though that would raise that number, it would not exceed your number. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see how $7 isn't viewed as rather expensive for that visitor count.

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by 1996 on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @04:45PM (#17769608)

Sure! here are my counter thoughts: What if your site changes every 5 minutes, and is about 100Mb?

12x24x100= lots of mb per day

S3 costs (if only for the bandwidth) will be greater than a server with a fair share unlimited connection

Also, cloudfront non free plans will kill you - again because of the bandwith.

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by giobox on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @05:10PM (#17769814)

> What if your site changes every 5 minutes, and is about 100Mb?

This is probably an exceptional rate of change for the _vast_ majority of static sites.

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by bigpicture on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @05:17PM (#17769864)

> This is probably an exceptional rate of change for the _vast_ majority of static sites.

I also doubt that many static sites have much "overhead" related to maintaining nginx config files and Let's Encrypt certificates.

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by outworlder on Wednesday August 15, 2018 @06:31PM (#17770315)

Sure, but then there's the whole overhead of maintaining a server.

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by ramses0 on Thursday August 16, 2018 @06:13PM (#17778843)

Clarify this: "The difference between zero servers and one server is much larger than the difference between 100 servers and 101 servers"

The person you're talking to is likely thinking of the "100=>101" case, not the "0=>1" case.

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Re:Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fractio... by 1996 on Thursday August 16, 2018 @01:02AM (#17772031)

Maintaining a server is not complicated nowadays, with ansible. I have a few dozens, some of them don't need any admin for years (like linode), the others have debian testing and ansible to deploy matching configurations and keep up with the updates

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