Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you're an idiot, it's more likely that you were just unaware of cloudfront or perhaps CDNs in general. S3 is for storing files, Cloudfront is for serving cached versions of them really quickly out of edge locations (i.e. the closest CDN datacentre to the user that requests it). In your usecase, your best bet is to use them in combination. Set up a Cloudfront distribution to point to your S3 bucket, then…
>If performance at the expense of convenience was your main reason for going with static site generation, you might want to rethink that decision (there are other perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a static site generator, security being my favourite). Great comment. I didn't get this part though. What would be a better alternative? Performance is one of the main reasons I considered this (uptime is another).…
To clarify: I'm not saying that static assets behind an edge cache is not performant, just saying that a dynamically generated site behind an edge cache is effectively the same performance wise. It's probably not worth the sacrifice in convenience if performance was your main reason for going the static generated route.
I can't speak to the argument from uptime as I haven't used shared hosting in a while. Using an edge cache (without S3) might give you a little help there, as it only needs to hit your shared hosting on cache expiry, but that obviously won't be as safe as statically generating the files and making CF read them out of S3.
I think S3 behind CF is a perfectly good approach. I was just saying that if you've currently got a dynamically generated site and are considering moving to static generation because of performance alone, the trade-off probably isn't worth the effort.
I wouldn't advise you personally to go back on that decision at all, especially because of the issues you've seen with uptime.
> I think my assumption was S3 did have edge locations
I think you get this from the rest of my comments but just to be clear: I've only ever experienced bad download times from S3 and would not feel comfortable recommending that you use it to serve traffic directly from the internet. It's not what S3 is for and so you shouldn't expect good performance from it in that use case.