It's an interesting use case. However, if you have almost static content you can also make use of heavy caching. That is a low end dynamic site with a powerful caching/delivery layer. I guess this is also doable with Amazon Cloudfront. It is all about how comfortable it is to update your site.
No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
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Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#32This is awesome. I was going to put my blog onto GitHub (you know, being a hacker it just makes sense since I already pay for it anyway), but it is intriguing to be able to put it on S3, especially with CloudFront.
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#33If you want to get really exotic, you can check out the Haskell version of this tool. My site ( http://dave.fayr.am ) does the same thing using Hakyll and S3. You can see the code here: https://github.com/KirinDave/public-website
http://www.gwern.net is built on Hakyll as well; I'm currently hosting the static files on NFSN, but they're noticeably more expensive than Amazon S3 and I've been thinking of doing the same thing. What did you have to do to get S3 working?
Basically nothing. I drag-drop the produced site via S3 Browser.app. I need to fix that part of the workflow; it's a little awkward here.
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#34While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile. You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted nor even charged with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman. This could be an issu…
Are those really issues for a static site? (Heck, would any of your examples be a static site in the first place?) And if a static site is dumped by Amazon S3, is that really so bad? You're a rsync and a DNS edit away from the site being back up - that's the beauty of a static site, it's just files in directories.
Are those really issues for a static site?
For most people, Wikileaks is a static site. They are unable to interact with it at all, ergo it could just be a static site.
Static vs Dynamic is orthogonal. You can still run afoul of the rules with a static site
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#35Any open source alternatives to Disqus that I could host myself? I don't want to use Disqus - apart from wanting to "own" my comments, it is also incompatible with my browser configuration (blocking 3rd party cookies).
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#36I actually made a Ruby gem to do exactly this on a repeatable basis for my own site. Here's the code: https://github.com/ohrite/vacation Here's the gem: http://rubygems.org/gems/vacation
Oh, I've been looking for something like this forever.
Thanks.
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are those really issues for a static site? (Heck, would any of your examples be a static site in the first place?) And if a static site is dumped by Amazon S3, is that really so bad? You're a rsync and a DNS edit away from the site being back up - that's the beauty of a static site, it's just files in directories.
Are those really issues for a static site? For most people, Wikileaks is a static site. They are unable to interact with it at all, ergo it could just be a static site. Static vs Dynamic is orthogonal. You can still run afoul of the rules with a static site
I think the point is that a static site is trivial to move.
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#38This is awesome. I was going to put my blog onto GitHub (you know, being a hacker it just makes sense since I already pay for it anyway), but it is intriguing to be able to put it on S3, especially with CloudFront.
I'd be more likely to put it behind Cloudflare than Cloudfront.
Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3
#39While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile. You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted nor even charged with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman. This could be an issu…
I think you nailed the TINY niche of things that amazon could take issue with and pull your site down. So now back to 99.9999999% of content producers on the internet: S3 is "extremely durable" I've heard of other (large) providers pulling sites that contained "objectionable" content down. Wikileaks just had the media's attention at the time.
At least one customer had issues removing data without court order. So in order to satisfy your 99.9999999% estimation amazon should have at least 1B S3 customers which is way to optimistic.