AWS's business isn't making simple things like this easy for solo practitioners who are never going to spend any money.

Their business is making big complicated things possible for companies that are going to spend a lot of money and don't care about a small amount of incidental complexity.

> Their business is making big complicated things possible for companies that are going to spend a lot of money and don't care about a small amount of incidental complexity.

While imposing technical limitations to extract more revenue along the way.

Could you share some examples?

Probably because it is built on tools that are made to scale arbitrarily and solve a large amount of very general needs. This need is simple, the tool is not built for simple needs though it can meet them.

I dislike the UX of AWS but the complexity here isn't strange to me. I bothered to set up the first bit of this (didn't need sub-dir index files so didn't realize it was a problem) since I wanted a simple storage, simple deploy and good resilience.

My site has been hit by HN a few times now and it hasn't been an issue. Fairly set and forget. But the start is annoying.

I have my personal website deployed to S3 and my DNS in Route53 with a Travis CI commit hook that will upload my files and update the permissions automatically when I push changes to Github.

Only costs ~$27/year to have a domain($15) and a static website deployed to S3/R53 ($1/month), which I've found to be fairly reasonable for the level of reliability I can expect.

I admit it is complicated up front but once it is setup and updates are automated it is really nice to not need to worry about self hosting, hardware, VPS', etc just for a simple website.

> push changes to Github

Or create an organisation on Github and publish this website as a Page. It is simple and it is free.

Certainly not a bad idea, but in my case I care to own the domain because I also use it when naming Java packages for the projects I write. Since I'm already paying for the domain, I figure I might as well use it for my actual website too. I've found S3 and Route53 to be the most cost effective for my particular use case.

I personally haven’t used it, but I think you can use your own domain with GitHub pages fairly easily.

https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...

Edit: I see others mentioned this too, but hopefully the link adds some added benefit!

Github Pages supports domains

It is easy to connect your own domain to a Github Page ;-)

Github Pages support custom domains for free.