Hosting a static website on AWS: a guide for SMBs

A high-performance, cost-effective architecture for your website

AWS lets you host a static website with enterprise-grade performance and reliability for under 5 euros per month. The architecture relies on two services: Amazon S3 for file storage and Amazon CloudFront for global content distribution. This combination delivers sub-second loading times, a free SSL certificate and 99.99% availability.

The S3 + CloudFront architecture

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) stores your website files: HTML pages, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript scripts and images. S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (eleven nines) durability, meaning your files will never be lost.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that replicates your files across over 400 edge locations worldwide. When a visitor accesses your site, CloudFront serves files from the geographically closest server. A visitor in Mulhouse receives files from Frankfurt or Paris, not from a server in the United States.

The SSL certificate is provided free by AWS Certificate Manager. Your site is accessible via HTTPS at no additional cost, which is a prerequisite for Google ranking and visitor trust.

Why choose a static site

A static site consists of pre-generated HTML files, unlike a dynamic site that generates each page on the fly from a database. Static site generators like Hugo, Gatsby or Next.js produce fast, secure and easy-to-host websites.

Security is a major advantage. A static site has no database to hack, no CMS to update and no vulnerable plugins. The attack surface is reduced to a minimum. This is why many businesses are migrating their corporate websites to static architectures.

Performance is the other decisive advantage. Without a database or server-side processing, each page loads in a few dozen milliseconds. Combined with CloudFront, your site achieves Lighthouse performance scores of 100/100.

Detailed cost breakdown

The AWS pricing model is based on actual consumption. For a business website with 10,000 visitors per month, the monthly cost breaks down as follows: S3 storage costs a few cents for a few megabytes of files. CloudFront requests cost about 1 euro for 10,000 visitors. Outbound data transfer costs about 1 euro for 10 GB.

In total, a standard business website costs between 1 and 3 euros per month. Even a site with 100,000 monthly visitors stays under 10 euros. This price includes high availability, a global CDN and an SSL certificate.

Setting it up

The initial configuration includes creating an S3 bucket, configuring CloudFront with Origin Access Control to secure bucket access, requesting an SSL certificate and configuring DNS. The entire process can be automated with AWS CloudFormation or CDK for reproducible deployments.

Content deployment is done by syncing files to S3 followed by a CloudFront cache invalidation. This process can be integrated into a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions for automatic deployment on every site change.

This site (lcmh.fr) uses exactly this S3 + CloudFront architecture. If you are considering this approach for your business, LCMH offers AWS consulting tailored to SMBs in Alsace, from design to production.

You can also read our article on optimizing AWS costs to keep your cloud budget under control.

Sources

1. AWS, Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3. docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/WebsiteHosting.html
2. AWS, Amazon CloudFront Pricing. aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing
3. AWS, Using HTTPS with CloudFront. docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/using-https.html