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Followup on "S3's missing feature"
By Dave Winer on Saturday, August 07, 2010 at 8:57 AM.

Quick followup to yesterday's post on Amazon and web hosting. permalink

So close yet so far. permalink

Turns out by coincidence Amazon had announced, the very day of my post, that their CloudFront service would support index files.  permalink

The economics are pretty attractive. The cost of the first access, assuming the index page is the only thing accessed via CloudFront, is about the same as S3. For the first access of the home page you pay double, once for CloudFront and once for S3. All subsequent accesses, until the cache expires, cost 1X an S3 access. permalink

But there's the rub. For a blogger, the home page is a rapidly changing page. I sometimes update the home page several times a minute while I'm tweaking up a story. CloudFront, by its nature, must cache. And caching is what you don't want to do with a potentially rapidly changing resource. permalink

It's the wrong solution.  permalink

People say S3 is just a storage service. But I'm not buying it. Why shouldn't a storage system also work as a web server? So much of S3 is useful for that, it's only natural to add the one final feature necessary to make it work. Or please let us know why. It's just a curiosity, is there some reason Amazon doesn't want us hosting full static sites in S3? (Please, unless you have a creative non-obvious answer, let's wait till (and if) we hear from Amazon.) permalink

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