aws website hosting cost basics and smart savings

What actually determines price

The aws website hosting cost comes from four levers: compute, storage, bandwidth, and requests. Add optional pieces like managed SSL, CDN, and DNS, and the bill reflects how much traffic you push and where users are.

Common hosting patterns

For static sites, S3 plus CloudFront is often the lowest-friction path; you pay per GB stored, transferred, and per request, typically pennies at small scale. Dynamic apps use EC2 or Lightsail bundles for predictable pricing, while Amplify or ECS/Fargate trade control for convenience.

• S3 + CloudFront: low idle cost; scales linearly with traffic.
• Lightsail: fixed monthly bundles with included bandwidth.
• EC2 + ALB: flexible, but you pay for instances, load balancing, and data out.
• Route 53: small charge per hosted zone plus query fees.
• Data transfer out: can dominate; cache aggressively at the edge.

Ways to keep costs in check

Use CloudFront caching, compress assets, and pick regions close to users. Turn on budgets and alerts, right-size instances, and offload static files to S3. The free tier can cushion trials, but test with real traffic and review the bill each month.