Retro-Hosting on Amazon S3 - why you don't need a fancy VPS for your website

Sat 25 February 2012

When I recently searched for a solution to host a large VM for a client to download, I remembered Amazon S3. Why deal with some shitty One-Click Hoster if I can just upload it to Amazon, pay a few cents and enjoy fullspeed and direct downloads?

The following night, I realized that I could just as well use this to host my website. Why waste a VPS on the task if the content hardly ever changed? Just generate the html files in advance and then use S3 to serve them. Obviously, I wasn't the first to come upon this idea, with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels leading the way.

Personally, I use Octopress to generate my site, which is really easy to do. Just clone Octopress from GitHub, run a few commands to build it and then deploy to S3. For a more in depth information, check out this guide from Jerome Bernard.

If you are like me, this will save you about fifty to a hundred bucks a year - nice :-)

Tags: web