Hello HN,<p>I'm building a really basic website with some lightweight Javascript for a small business and am mostly expecting traffic from SEO or by word so nothing crazy like a Slashdot/HN effect.<p>Taking this into consideration, would it be more cost-effective to have the website hosted on Amazon? I'm predicting large periods of time where people won't be visiting the site, so I feel like going with a traditional dedicated host would be a waste.<p>Thanks!
If it's totally static you can just host it on S3 and it costs pennies per month. Here is a how to:<p><a href="http://thechrisoshow.com/2011/06/05/how-to-host-a-static-website-on-s3/" rel="nofollow">http://thechrisoshow.com/2011/06/05/how-to-host-a-static-web...</a>
The last project I did was all client side, so I hosted it on AWS. So far I really like it, its extremely simple and cheap. The only trip-up I had was that the server wasn't correctly serving .js and .css files through root directory, like you would think you do in website mode.<p>The quick-fix hack was to instead point to the direct link like src="s3.amazonaws.com/soundcloudinstant.com/jq.js" instead of the normal src="jq.js".<p>app at <a href="http://soundcloudinstant.com" rel="nofollow">http://soundcloudinstant.com</a><p>edit: formatting errors
It's not clear which parts of AWS you're thinking of using.<p>If the Javascript is client-side only, then you could host this on a combination of S3/Cloudfront pretty easily.<p>A full EC2 instance seems like overkill if this is a simple static site - I would look at traditional webhosting, or a small VPS instead, if you don't like the S3/Cloudfront approach.
What's wrong with the standard $3-a-month shared hosting service for this? Is a managed environment and phone support not worth $3 a month to this business?