“How to Soar in the Clouds Without Burning a Hole in Your Wallet: A Thrifty Guide to Cloud Services!”

#cheapcheapercheapest

In this series, we will be talking about the possible cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, DaaS and [a-zA-Z]+aaS) that are cheapest for the given problem statement.

In this article : The cheapest possible way to host/maintain/secure/monitor a static web app.

Assumptions:

• average "RPS" (say a particular age group or an intranet site for a college campus or your blog which is read by all your 29 friends after you have asked them to).
• SSL enabled.
• Custom domain decorated.
• No streaming please.
• Don't have a cloud subscription ( starting fresh )
• Not worried about Earthquakes taking down data-centres.
• Make it practical, easy to use and does not require your basement lit.

Options we have:

1. Azure:

2. AWS

3. GitHub

Verdict:

I have been at this for the past 4 hours and no matter how much I try, its tough to beat GitHub. It is by far the cheapest method to host a small time "static website" developed/maintained by 1 or 2 individuals, with a more than average hit rate.

Azure is way too costly post a certain limit because of the custom domain and DNS, AWS loses it because of their very high data transfer rates. Host your next blogging site will be on GitHub, but do remember that, Github's primary function is content-hosting and repo management and to compare it with Cloud Providers like AWS and Azure might not be fair, but if your aim is "JUST THAT ONE WEBSITE" go the github way and en-route do learn how to write Git Actions and basic Git-workflows