I don’t usually do this but I decided to check your post history. I don’t know if anyone else posted your blog posts to HN but assuming it’s just you, I counted five posts (excluding the flagged ones) that would have made it to the front page of HN for any meaningful amount of time. Based on this, I would say that you are unlikely to be HN’a top blogger.

And I don’t know how you’d set up your blog with AWS but I don’t see how it could be expensive to host static content there.

Wrong assumption, a fair bunch of the posts came from other people :p

I honestly wonder what's the average distribution for HN contributors. I imagine it's not much for personal blogs. Not trying to compare myself to the new york times or cloudflare blog obviously.

Heh. Checked by the domain instead and got 10 submissions with double digit or more vote counts. I still think pg and jacquesm have you beat by quite a bit but yes you have 2x the front page posts I initially spotted.

That's simply not true. I hit #1 a few times with content hosted on S3. Ended up paying maybe extra $2 those months. I'd be worried if I hosted any large files that came with it, but just a blog post? Barely noticeable.

I have images in almost every post. Diagram, schemas, stock images, gif, anything. I guess you don't?

The difference between $2 and $20 will strike when you start having pictures and with $200 the day you (accidentally) put a large image or GIF.

You can lose money accidentally in many ways. I agree you have to watch out, but still disagree with the number of people dismissing S3 as a quick way to bankruptcy if you get HN #1.

Cloudflare/Cloudfront, restrict origin IP. Done

This could be an issue (from your site link in a previous comment):

With an ad blocker, this page takes 83 requests to load a total of 2.31 MB.

It's because of images and comments, both of which are critical to a blog. There's one request per image no matter what.

Wordpress is actually really good on that, it's resizing the images automatically for thumbnails and mobiles with caching.