AWS - Serving static files with performance in mind

Question

I'm working on a project of mine and I'm expecting about ~500-750k unique pings per month.

I'm curious to hear if there's any better way (in terms of latency) to host a static website than my idea below.

Idea:

• EC2 instance running NGINX with gzip enabled
• CloudFront for CDN

What I'm hosting:

• HTML (3 pages in total)
• CSS
• SVG/PNG images

Also, if my idea above is OK, which EC2 instance would you go for? I'm thinking a micro instance would do just fine, I don't see why I would need the extra RAM/CPU.

Edit: Or how about something simpler like S3 w/ CloudFront?

Answer 1

Cost effective , high-available, fully managed , secure and fault-tolerant solution for your case is AWS S3 :

1. Create S3 Bucket (mybucket) and enable website static properties on it.

2. Create IAM user with a permission of read/write on that bucket.

       "Version": "2012-10-17",
       "Statement": [
         {
           "Action": "s3:ListAllMyBuckets",
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
         },
         {
           "Sid": "Stmt1487841624000",
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": ["s3:*"],
           "Resource": ["arn:aws:s3:::mybucket/*", "arn:aws:s3:::mybucket"]
         }
       ]
       }
   

   (Keep secret key and access key and the region where you create the bucket)

3. Configure your secret key and access key in your laptop

     aws configure;
   

4. Then upload your static website :

     aws s3 sync /path/to/local/dir s3://mybucket; 
   

Congrats! your website is hosted : http://[BUCKETNAME].s3-website.[REGIONMAME].amazonaws.com

If you want to :

• map the website to another domain

• or/and use SSL

• or/and integrate with WAF.

• or/and so on...

Use also AWS CloudFront.