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Last active March 18, 2016 02:05
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2016-03-17-hosting-cost.md

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: estimated ~$5-20 per month (often a bare minimum for a dynamic site).
  • VPS or “cloud” hosting: variable, can be as low as $5 per month (and there is really no upper limit, as with everything virtualized or “cloudy”). One might want to look into an option like this for a dynamic site.

Without advocating for any other particular services (since I haven’t used enough of them myself to report accurately), there are a variety of other deployment options, since Jekyll does not have specific requirements for serving. As always, it depends on your need. But if your needs are minimal, static sites are very cheap to run.

{% assign image = page.image[0] %}

{{ image.alt }}

{{ image.caption | markdownify }}

I chose S3 with Route53 and CloudFront for its acceptable cost, high reliability, and flexibility in deployment (like setting up secure TLS with a fast CloudFront CDN).

Footnotes

  1. Check out Amazon’s cost calculator for a detailed breakdown of how much AWS offerings cost. In general, ignore the “free usage tier” – it does not cover much and it runs out after only a year. If you’re self-hosting or doing business, plan past the short term. ↩

@michaellee
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Nice break down with real numbers. I think mentioning GitHub Pages twice is a bit redundant. If you were going to put it in as an aside maybe not so much.

I think also mentioning the TLS feature is a plus too and link to your excellent article.

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