(a bit of shameless plugin but since it's related) I'm working on a SaaS project to automatically copy a website as static pages with versioning and pushing them to S3 or github pages as an online backup (to avoid having a blog down due to a spike in traffic for ex), email in profile for more info.

The concept is interesting, but I'm wondering about performances of S3 compared to a normal webserver on EC2 or elsewhere. Any clue?

Hi Andres, S3 is designed to scale up to very high request rates. However, if your workload exceeds 300 GET requests per second, as suggested by AWS, you can consider Amazon CloudFront for performance optimization.

Interesting, thanks. Do you know if the cache on CloudFront can be configured? I am worried about delivering stale content when the website changes frequently

Thanks for your comment. Actually it doesn't really matter when you are serving static content. No need to think about performance when it comes to S3 for this kind of usage.

But I want that my static pages are delivered with a low latency to users. Let's imagine I don't add CloudFront to the configuration to save some money, how quick are the GET requests served by S3 compared to a classic webserver?

Can I use a different dns service with AWS services like EC2 or I have to pay for Route 53??

You definitely can, the principle is still valid. Anyway, Route53 is extremely cheap, less than a dollar for a million queries per month, is very reliable and it integrates very well with the other AWS services, so it's definitely worth the price, IMO. What alternative services where you thinking about?

I already have a domain registered on dreamhost and I didn't want to change nameservers. But reading about the alias concept and its cheapness, as you said, I think I'm going to migrate to R53!

Thank you!

DNS, SMTP and such are boring services! R53 is robust cheap and doesn't need maintaining so .. go for it!