4 ms·

Using Amazon S3 to host a static copy of your site

34 points by edw519 17y ago

imajes 17y ago
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.
- miracle 17y ago
  They couldn't charge that much consultancy time then ;)
- Sam_Odio 17y ago
  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.
gerrypower 17y ago
Do it for free using Google's App Engine and dry drop http://drydrop.binaryage.com/ http://drydrop.binaryage.com/ Here is my test blog running using that setup: blog.innovationpower.ca
- rwolf 17y ago
  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.
gfodor 17y ago
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.
byoung2 17y ago
Why not just host the site on a scalable platform (Rackspace Cloud, MediaTemple, etc.) to begin with?
jasonkester 17y ago
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!
- ckinnan 17y ago
  Additionally, Cloudfront is cheaper than S3!
  - pjhyett 17y ago
    Unless I'm missing the sarcasm, you still pay for your S3 usage when you're using CloudFront.
    - tlrobinson 17y ago
      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."
      - jasonkester 17y ago
        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-costs-compared-to-s3.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2009/01/cloudfront-cos... http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-performance-numbers.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-per...
- stephenjudkins 17y ago

34 points by edw519 17y ago

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.

miracle 17y ago
They couldn't charge that much consultancy time then ;)
Sam_Odio 17y ago
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.

gerrypower 17y ago

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

rwolf 17y ago
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.

gfodor 17y ago

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.

byoung2 17y ago

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

jasonkester 17y ago

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!

ckinnan 17y ago
Additionally, Cloudfront is cheaper than S3!
- pjhyett 17y ago
  Unless I'm missing the sarcasm, you still pay for your S3 usage when you're using CloudFront.
  - tlrobinson 17y ago
    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."
    - jasonkester 17y ago
      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-costs-compared-to-s3.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2009/01/cloudfront-cos... http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-performance-numbers.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/11/cloudfront-per...
stephenjudkins 17y ago