January 19, 2024 - Cloudfront Egress is pretty cheap!

This isn’t really a TIL, but it turns out that Amazon provides 1TB of free egress from S3 buckets with a CloudFront CDN front-end (instead of the standard 100GB available for free with S3 alone). To get started, I followed this tutorial – but it assumes a pretty high level of prior understanding of AWS, so if you’ve never used CloudFront, AWS, or S3 before, it might be best to google around for another tutorial.

So, what can you use this for? Well, turns out that this makes hosting static websites (with 1TB of bandwidth) really cheap. Almost free, in fact, since S3 has 5GB of free storage. Combine this with a simple Lambda for a contact form, and a domain name (Route53 DNS is free for CloudFront distributions), and you’ve got a pretty cheap website running on AWS.