Your small-business website should cost about $1 a month to host
Most small-business sites are a handful of pages that rarely change. Here is how static hosting on AWS gets them faster, more secure, and nearly free to run.
A typical small-business website is five to fifteen pages: home, services, about, a few location or service pages, and a way to get in touch. It changes a few times a year.
Many businesses pay a website builder or managed host every month for that, often somewhere in the range of $15 to $50, and sometimes more once add-ons are included. For a brochure site, most of that pays for machinery you do not need.
There is a simpler approach, and it is the one this site uses.
What a static site is
A static site is pre-built HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images. There is no database and no server-side code running when someone visits. The pages are generated once, at build time, and then served as plain files.
That one decision has big consequences:
- Speed. Files served from a content delivery network load fast everywhere, which helps both visitors and search rankings.
- Security. No database and no admin login on the public server means far less to attack. There are no plugins to patch every month.
- Reliability. Serving files is the most boring, battle-tested thing on the internet. There is very little that can break.
- Cost. Storing and serving a few megabytes of files costs almost nothing.
The setup on AWS
- S3 stores the site’s files. Storage for a small site is a few megabytes, which costs a fraction of a cent per month.
- CloudFront sits in front of S3 as a CDN. It caches the site in locations around the world and provides HTTPS with a free certificate from AWS Certificate Manager. CloudFront’s always-free tier covers a large amount of monthly traffic, far more than most small businesses use.
- Route 53 handles DNS for your domain. A hosted zone is about $0.50 a month.
Add your domain registration, typically $10 to $20 a year, and the total for most small businesses lands around a dollar or two a month. Exact pricing changes, so check AWS’s current rates, but the order of magnitude has held steady for years.
One technical note: S3’s own website endpoint serves plain HTTP only. Putting CloudFront in front is what gives you HTTPS on your own domain, and it is worth doing.
“But I need to update it”
This is the fair objection. With a builder, you log in and edit. With a static site, content lives in files, and publishing means running a build and uploading the result.
There are good answers depending on how often things change:
- Rarely (a few times a year): your developer makes the change. It takes minutes, and a care plan covers it.
- Regularly: text and listings live in simple files or a headless CMS, and an automated pipeline rebuilds and publishes on every change.
- You need a blog: posts are written in Markdown, a plain-text format that is easy to learn, and published the same way.
What you give up
Static hosting is not right for everything. If you need user accounts, a shopping cart with live inventory, or complex dynamic pages, you need a back end. Even then, the marketing pages can usually stay static and fast while the dynamic parts live in a separate app.
Contact forms are a common sticking point. A static site can still have one. It posts to a form service or a small serverless function, or you can skip forms entirely and use email and phone links.
Beyond hosting: getting found
A fast site is the foundation, not the finish line. The basics I set up on every site:
- Google Business Profile, complete and consistent with the site. For local businesses this often matters more than the website itself.
- Structured data (schema.org) so search engines and AI assistants understand who you are, where you are, and what you do.
- A clean page per service and location, written for the questions customers actually ask.
- Analytics so you know what is working.
- A sitemap and sensible titles and descriptions on every page.
The bottom line
For most small businesses, a custom static site on S3 and CloudFront is faster, safer, and dramatically cheaper to run than a monthly builder subscription, and you own every file of it.
If your current site is slow, dated, or costs more each month than it should, I can help you move it.