I'd suggest a middle ground: designate some large, important swath of your public site as sacred and make it static. Host it with stripped down vanilla Apache o

I'd suggest a middle ground: designate some large, important swath of your public site as sacred and make it static. Host it with stripped down vanilla Apache or Nginx. Then, where you benefit from dynamicism, expose another resource (like a small EC2 server) in your URL space to implement it. Yes, exactly. This is what I'm actually thinking about. (I agree that a one-hundred-percent static site is a thought experiment, not a plan; it's not really going to fly in the twenty-first century. I chose the word "dream" in my original post with some care. ;) And "marketing engineering" is a nice concise term to explain why you're going to need dynamic features somewhere on your site, sooner or later, even on something as apparently simple as a personal blog.) I've seen quite a few websites built on a dynamic CMS with a bunch of optional modules containing tens of thousands of lines of hairy PHP, running on a big pile of heavy-duty high-availability hardware... most of which is apparently there just to be ready to rebuild the Varnish cache as quickly and reliably as possible on the rare occasions when that cache gets cold. (On some sites, the cache never gets cleared except by some unavoidable accident: The performance consequences of trying to rebuild the cold cache under load are too dire to contemplate.) A very high percentage of the actual page loads on such sites are served directly from a Varnish instance, which consumes very few CPU resources and a moderate amount of RAM on a single box. At some point I began to wonder why we conceptualize such sites as "dynamic sites with a static cache" instead of as "static sites, with a few dynamic elements on some pages, and a perhaps-more-synchronous-than-necessary PHP-based page-generation engine that runs on public-facing servers". There are a bunch of reasons, but I wonder how many of them might ultimately prove to be historical reasons.