Web Hosting Costs

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As I discussed in a blog post last year, one of the websites that I am administrator of moved to AWS for it’s web hosting. The website is entirely static, i.e. it does not use any server-side scripting, and therefore I elected to: use CloudFront as the CDN; and use S3 as the back-end storage.

Now that an entire UK financial year has passed since the switch (and the AWS Free Tier has expired) I decided that now was the right time to start comparing costs. Below is a bar chart of the total cost (each UK financial year) of the website since 2005. The old provider used to renew the domain for two years at a time, hence the bumps in the blue bars.

Download:
  1. 512 px × 384 px (0.2 Mpx; 23.5 KiB)
  2. 1,024 px × 768 px (0.8 Mpx; 44.5 KiB)
  3. 2,048 px × 1,536 px (3.1 Mpx; 92.5 KiB)
  4. 2,880 px × 2,160 px (6.2 Mpx; 68.7 KiB)

In the last few years the annual costs were getting quite high: approaching £100 per year (with 2019 blowing all previous costs out of the water and being closer to £200 per year). Clearly the costs after the switch to AWS are much lower. Looking at the recent months, it appears that the increase in cost after the AWS Free Tier expired amounts to less than £1 per month, so that shouldn’t perturb the plot too much.

If I keep my fingers crossed that the £/$ exchange rate doesn’t do anything too outrageous in the future then I think that £5 per month (or £60 per year) is a reasonable cost for hosting a small static website.