> AWS CloudFront pricing seems pretty competitive with other CDNs

Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.

The whole point of CDNs is to host static assets, why wouldn't you use one? They are dead simple to use.

Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other? Better question is; why default to using more things before you actually need them?

Personally, software engineering for me is mostly about trying to avoid accidental complexity. People obsessing about "web scale" and "distributed architecture" before they even figured out if people actually want to use the platform/product/tool they've used tends to add a lot of complexity.

> Because caddy/nginx/apache (any web server really) can serve that content as well as any other?

That's not really true if you care about reliability. You need 2 nodes in case one goes down/gets rebooted/etc, and then you need a way to direct traffic away from bad nodes (via DNS or a load balancer or etc).

You'll end up building half of a crappy CDN to try to make that work, and it's way more complicated than chucking CloudFlare in front of static assets.

I would be with you if this was something complicated to cache where you're server-side templating responses and can't just globally cache things, but for static HTML/CSS/JS/images it's basically 0 configuration.

> That's not really true if you care about reliability

While reliability is always some concern, we are talking about a website containing docs for a nerdy tool used by a minuscule percentage of developers. No one will complain if it goes down for 1h daily.

With the uptime guarantees AWS, GCS, DO, etc. provide - it will probably 1h per 365 days accumulative (@ 99.99% uptime). 2 nodes for a simple static site is just overkill.

But, honestly, for this: just use github pages. It's OSS and GitHub is already used. They can use a separate repository to host the docs if repo size from assets are a concern (e.g. videos).

How is setting up a web server not using more things than you need when you could just drag and drop a folder using one of many different CDN providers? (Or of course set up integrations as you want)

Just because you're using a UI doesn't mean it isn't more complicated. I'm thinking "complexity" in terms of things intertwined, rather than "difficult for someone used to use GUIs".

And configuring a web server as well as the server it is running on is not intertwined complexity?

You're welcome to set up the CDN with a CLI...

I'm thinking of complexity as "shit I have to pay for"

Far more expensive than just having a dumb server somewhere at some normal host.

People simply do not understand how expen$ive AWS is, and how little value it actually has for most people.

It's really a tradeoff of saving time by paying more money. A lot of people chose it when they'd rather not pay more money and end up unhappy

A lot of other people also pick it for very narrow use cases where it wouldn't have been that much more time to learn and do it themselves and end up paying a lot of money and also aren't happy

It's pretty nice for mid-size startups to completely ignore performance and capacity planning and be able to quickly churn out features while accumulating tech debt and hoping they make it long enough to pay the tech debt back

Most people will never make it past the free tier on any of CloudFront, Cloudflare, Netlify, Render, etc.

You can just drag and drop a folder and have a static site hosted in a few minutes.

A year ago I researched this topic for a static website of my own. All providers I looked at were $5 and I want to say the cheapest I found was slightly lower. By comparison, I am still within free tier limits of AWS S3 and cloudfront (CDN) since I am not getting much traffic. So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free, but if I host on a single server in Ohio it costs $5/month.

Did you check NearlyFreeSpeech.net? If you are getting little traffic it costs practically nothing for a static site.

Thank you! That did not come up in my search, but it looks great and is reasonably priced. I may use that for another project.

But why host my own static content when cloudflare r2 buckets will give me a million reads a month for free?