It’s been over a decade since I touched a static website. After Amazon announced website endpoint support for S3, I wanted to give it a try since the benefits are pretty appealing.

A static website eliminates the databases and serverside code execution.

Hosting a static site on Amazon S3 eliminates supporting the web server, load balancing, caching, etc.

By switching from a common cms system such as Wordpress, your most likely to gain a lot of speed and lower the possibility of security vulnerabilities.

A con for some users is that your only option for increasing functionality is to write JavaScript and let it run clientside. For a blog, this is perfect in my opinion.

The tools I used to create a full featured static blog:

Cyrax generates the static site (python / Jinja2 templates)

Amazon S3 serves the HTML and JavaScript

Flickr for photo hosting (could do this with S3, but I like the iPhoto integration with Flickr)

Feedburner serves the rss and publishes new posts to Twitter via Feedburner Socialize

Disqus handles the user commenting system

Google Analytics takes care of traffic analysis

In the end, I am sticking with Wordpress for T3CH.com. For simpler blogs, I’d definitely consider using Cyrax.