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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

I feel like SSL/TLS is a requirement for websites in 2014.

Does Amazon S3 and CloudFront support HTTPS?

Even worse than the $600 a month, there's no way to disable ssl on your site if you're serving off cloudfront, so if one of your users makes an https request and you're not shelling out the cash for custom certs they'll be greeted by a big red warning page in chrome (returned cert for *.cloudfront.com).

This is actually a great point against using custom domains (CNAMEs) with Cloudfront. At least if you can't afford the custom SSL certficate option.

Cloudflare somehow got this right. They serve non HTTPS enabled web sites with different IP addresses so that you can never reach them over HTTPS (could be better "This webpage is not available" vs. scary red "This is probably not the site you are looking for!" message in Chrome). Plus, they have a great free anycast DNS network that can be compared to Route 53. And best off all, you never pay for the bandwidth.

S3 and Cloudfront both support custom HTTPS certificates, to deliver https via your own domain name and certificate. [1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/

$600 per month seems expensive for a static site.

These are personal opinions, not fully factual, I've only worked with 2 cloud based start ups (neither full time).

Cloud services are barely a convenience to the customers/business that run on them. For a start up buying 50-100k in servers starting off is shocking but in most cases high usage cloud computing for hosting/databases will add up to that quickly.

The only thing 'cloud' actually does for its customer is prevent them from actually buying computers and renting rack space. Which isn't 'that' expensive (20k or so for a base line server), and 150 a month in rack rent.

Cloud lowers the bar of entry, but once you've entered staying with cloud isn't optimal.

I think it's because it's a wildcard certificate?

Its expensive since Amazon uses DNS based CDNs. Each pop requires them to assign you a dedicated IP. They don't do shared certs like other CDN providers. One nice thing is that you can use an EV Cert.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/06/11/announc...

No, but if you think that it is a necessity, you can use S3 then Cloudflare in front to force SSL. I believe that Google Pagespeed Service allows a custom SSL Cert too.

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