When comparing Amazon S3 vs GitLab Pages, the Slant community recommends GitLab Pages for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” GitLab Pages is ranked 2nd while Amazon S3 is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose GitLab Pages is:
Gitlab pages are quick and simple to setup, with [documentation](http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/pages/) that's short and fast to read through.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free for small sites
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
Pro Easily scalable
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.
Pro Super cheap with a year's worth of free service
S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.
Pro Fast setup
You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.
Pro Fast
S3 is fast even without a CDN.
Pro Easy to setup with CDN
Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.
Pro Supports custom root domains
To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.
Pro No security risks
There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.
Pro Easy to setup
Gitlab pages are quick and simple to setup, with documentation that's short and fast to read through.
Pro Regular updates
GitLab is being constantly worked on and has a new release every month.
Pro Free private repositories
On gitlab.com you can have free private repositories.
Pro Open Source
Unlike BitBucket or GitHub, GitLab itself is Open Source. Even EE (which is needed for pages, but is free on Gitlab.com) is "source available".
Cons
Con Credit card needed
Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.
Con Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing
By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.
Con Confusing web interface
Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.
Con No SFTP support
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.