I would have thought so too. Then you can get your simple deploy by adding your provider to ~/.ssh/config and setting an alias for

    scp -R ./public_html sharedhosting:

in your shell rc file .. seems much easier than all this! you can even stick `gulp build && ` at the start of your alias if it so pleases you!

Then again if cloudfront + s3 can indeed come in at under $1 per month then I can see why you'd go down that route. I'd like to see what kind of sites you can host for that cost.