

Using Amazon S3 to host a static copy of your site - edw519
http://www.cykod.com/blog/post/2009-09-using-s3-to-host-a-static-copy-of-your-site

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jasonkester
Why did you skip the final step? You were like 90 seconds away from having it
deployed on CloudFront, and thus quickly served anywhere in the world on a
real Content Delivery Network.

It would have taken something on the order of one right-click in your S3
organizer of choice, followed by a CNAME record.

S3 has about 300-800ms latency on average. CloudFront's latency is 46ms.
(exactly, every single time, 46ms. It's spooky).

So close... and yet so far!

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ckinnan
Additionally, Cloudfront is cheaper than S3!

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pjhyett
Unless I'm missing the sarcasm, you still pay for your S3 usage when you're
using CloudFront.

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tlrobinson
As I understand it not every request will hit S3, only cache misses on the
edge servers.

"Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original,
definitive versions of your files. Normal fees will apply for Amazon S3 usage,
including “origin fetches” – data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge
locations."

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jasonkester
All together, it comes in as a little less than double the cost of S3 alone.
Here are a my observed numbers (for cost and performance, respectively):

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2009/01/cloudfront-
cos...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2009/01/cloudfront-costs-
compared-to-s3.html)

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-
per...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-performance-
numbers.html)

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gerrypower
Do it for free using Google's App Engine and dry drop
<http://drydrop.binaryage.com/> Here is my test blog running using that setup:
blog.innovationpower.ca

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rwolf
What a hilarious abuse of the nice folks at GitHub and GAE! I guess it's the
natural progression of those GitHub blogs that have been cropping up...

I'm not saying I won't try it--but I'll feel bad.

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gfodor
Note that from the article they never acutally _ran_ the site off of s3. They
copied everything over but the big traffic spike never came.

IMHO, CloudFront would have been a smarter option, we've found that S3 has
very volatile latency when serving files directly to end users over HTTP.

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imajes
better: use some ec2 instances (stock, or custom) and run squid front-proxy.
It's just as easy to configure and you get cache sweeping and so on for free.

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Sam_Odio
The advantage is price. If you're running two medium ec2 instances you're
going to pay $288/month before bandwidth.

5GB of S3 storage is $0.75/month before bandwidth.

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byoung2
Why not just host the site on a scalable platform (Rackspace Cloud,
MediaTemple, etc.) to begin with?

