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I pay $0 a year to host my Next.js website on S3.

I use MDX to write posts. I have CI/CD set up to auto publish when I push a new post. It's a simple set up (for a developer).

I don't get why one would want to or need to pay hundreds of dollars each year to host a simple blog, especially if that person is technically inclined. There are cheaper/free options.

Even your average Squarespace/Wordpress/Wix user will pay less than 400 euros a year. This sounds like the exact opposite of "perfect" to me.

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> I pay $0 a year to host my Next.js website on S3.

It's only free while you have no traffic. Getting a single post on the top of HN could cost you e.g. $10.

I find the idea of using AWS for personal use absolutely terrifying. You are signing up for literally unlimited costs. If my site gets ddosed, I don’t want a $100,000 bill, I want the site to go offline.

then use Lightsail or set a maximum size for your ec2 autoscaling group

But outbound traffic

Cloudflare Pages is free.

Or stop overengineering and use a PaaS like Netlify.

Honestly this is a valid concern. I am not knocking AWS and they are working with us but $100000 in one week from bad code in a Java service is really nerve racking. For the record the only reason I use AWS over other clouds is because they actually work with you when stuff like this happens. ( Its taking a long time but we are hopeful)

It's very odd that AWS doesn't support spending caps. A lot of other services and paid APIs I use have them, and they save me a ton of stress.

As long as enough people use AWS despite the lack of spending caps and the stress it causes, it just means Amazon effectively monetizing your risk tolerance.

I would prefer to pay like this, especially since I'm not writing a ton of blog posts. To me it's better to pay $10 for a viral post than pay $10/month continuously with little traffic. It depends on your use case though. Low traffic sites like mine are great for hosting on S3.

Same but Astro on Vercel's free tier. If my traffic suddenly spikes 1000000x, my site might go down temporarily. That's ok.

Paying $400/year to get some static html based on markdown for a personal website seems insane to me.

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