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Add to SafariWhen comparing Amazon S3 vs NearlyFreeSpeech, the Slant community recommends NearlyFreeSpeech for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” NearlyFreeSpeech is ranked 5th while Amazon S3 is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose NearlyFreeSpeech is:
NearlyFreeSpeech charges per resources and services used, as such it is very scalable and makes static site hosting very cheap for users who decide to go with this hosting option since static sites require very little resources.
Question 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 Very scalable
NearlyFreeSpeech charges per resources and services used, as such it is very scalable and makes static site hosting very cheap for users who decide to go with this hosting option since static sites require very little resources.
Pro Relatively easy to use
NearlyFreeSpeech provides SFTP access and a more traditional shared hosting environment compared to other services. This makes it easy for users who are not very advanced but still want to create a static site.
Pro Very privacy oriented
They will never discuss your situation with anyone to the extent that the law allows. They won't even state why a website is down. If you are not the account holder, don't expect any details from them.
Pro Very informative FAQ
The FAQ will address pretty much everything you might want to know before joining, and then some.
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.
Con Only for those who know what they are doing
They do absolutely no "hand holding" unless you purchase a support package and even then it's barebones.
Con The FAQ is so long that you can spend over an hour reading it
That's the FAQ if you are thinking about becoming a member. There's a much more detailed FAQ for members.
Con Not free
Although it can be very cheap to host a simple static site on NearlyFreeSpeech for about $3/$4 a year, it still is not free.
