Alternative to heroku or google app engine for static files

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I'm creating a simple site for my family and which is basically just static files (I don't want a CMS).

I've tried using heroku and google app engine but heroku wind down the server which yields a 30s delay on some requests and google app engine takes up to 500ms to serve a static page.

So my question is, are there any alternatives to heroku and google app engine for hosting content in the cloud.
It does not have to be free but I'd like to keep the costs to less than $10 per month.

I could always just rent a regular VPS or something similar but in my experience they can be much worse than app engine when it comes to serving files.

I've tested a local server running nginx vs app engine and it seems like app engine is performing rather well, it's approx 500ms behind the local server but since it uses a CDN it will probably be faster for subsequent requests.

Best Answer

Well, one possibility is Amazon's static website hosting over S3 together with a CNAME mapping.

The S3 latency isn't super low either. If your site is popular (so that caches would be likely to not evict your content) then you could experiment with adding Amazon Cloudfront CDN (i.e. edge proxy caching).

Related Solutions

Using Google App Engine for static files

The documentation on how to get GAE to serve static content is here: Using Static Files.

It's rather simple, you just define a static directory in your app.yaml file.

handlers:
- url: /stylesheets
  static_dir: stylesheets

Using Google’s App Engine as CDN for static files

The app engine is a cloud computing platform and is not designed to be a CDN. While your data may be stored on multiple nodes those nodes are not edge-cache nodes so they will not offer the same benefits that a CDN would. You can compare GAE vs various CDNs using the CloudHarmony.com speed test. Here were the results when I tested today:

Order   Service Location    Type    Size    Time (secs) Rate (Mb/s)
1   Google AppEngine    download    1.00 MB     3.50    2.29
2   Google AppEngine    upload      512.00 KB   3.57    1.12
3   Google AppEngine    website     102.55 KB   0.75    1.07

Order   Service     Type        Size    Time (secs) Rate (Mb/s)
05  EdgeCast CDN    download    1.00 MB 1.03    7.77
02  Cotendo CDN     download    1.00 MB 1.08    7.37
12  Amz CloudFront  download    1.00 MB 1.11    7.19
10  CacheFly CDN    download    1.00 MB 1.29    6.19
08  Azure CDN       download    1.00 MB 1.36    5.90
07  Internap CDN    download    1.00 MB 1.47    5.43
09  VoxCAST CDN     download    1.00 MB 1.55    5.17
04  SimpleCDN       download    1.00 MB 1.65    4.84
06  MaxCDN          download    1.00 MB 1.69    4.73
03  Highwinds CDN   download    1.00 MB 1.81    4.43
11  Akamai CDN      download    1.00 MB 2.22    3.60
01  LimeLight CDN   download    1.00 MB 2.34    3.42

You'll see that the CDN ends up being 2-7 times faster than GAE for file downloads.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Using Google App Engine for static files

Using Google’s App Engine as CDN for static files

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