Chatting with Michael Lee about my [previous post on what Jekyll is and why I use it]({% post_url 2016-03-16-consider-jekyll %}), I realized more should be said about how affordable static sites can be. From my own experience, here are some cost estimates for hosting a small site (in US dollars):
- GitHub Pages: completely free (fewer Jekyll Ruby plugins allowed than a normal Jekyll deployment, but enables automatic deploying).
- Amazon S3: starting at $0.03 to a few dollars per month for higher traffic (rate depends on usage). [^1]
- S3 with Route53 for DNS routing: starting at $0.53 to a few dollars per month.
- S3, Route53 and CloudFront: starting at $0.70 to a few dollars per month. My own site costs around $1.50 per month with this setup in early 2016.
- [Shared hosting](https://en.wikipe