Sure, but it's unlikely you actually have to place a CDN in front of your manual, it's mostly text with few images. People default to using CDNs way too quickly today.
After initial setup it was smooth sailing. Other more reasonable setups would also have been smooth sailing, but... they weren't setup yet. I was uneasy about the possibility of a surprise bill happening, as it eventually did, but until the brain dead LLM leeches came along, that just never happened. After a decade of it not happening, I wasn't that concerned anymore, but I guess when it comes to the AI bots, I had my head in the sand a bit. I still though something like a 500% bill might happen, not 5000%.
Once it did happen, I immediately shut my sides down, and within the hour the account was no more. On the way out I saw that you can now actually set a "spending limit", it still had a [new] next to it. I tried setting it up, but could only quickly figure out how to setup a notification. It might be possible to set an actual spending limit, but not in a few minutes -- probably got to read some documentation for that.
But even if this were a one click setting, it wouldn't have made a difference at this point. You do this once and I am gone. Also, I wanted to move away from Amazon anyway, so really, this was the kick in the pants that I needed.
For now I am using Github Pages for the very static parts, and the free hosting provided by my email provider, for the slightly less static manuals generated with Github Actions. I would have made sense to use Github for both (not least so that Microsoft could cover the cost of the bots they have unleashed), but I wanted to avoid the complexity of committing to the same pages repository from the CI pipelines of multiple package repositories.
Is this true? He mentions the provider being AWS, surely some sort of threshold can be set?
In addition, it's a pay-per-use platform
1. High egress costs
2. No hard spending limits
Both of these were problems for the author. I don't mean to "blame the victim" but the choice of AWS here had a predictable outcome. Static documentation is the easiest content to host and AWS is the most expensive way to host it.
Also some solutions for generating static content sites instead of "dynamic" CMS where they store everything in a DB
If it's new, I'd say the easiest option is start with a content hosting system that has built-in caching (assuming that exists for what you're trying to deploy)
I donated a bit of money to help tarsius offset the cost of AWS LLM abuse, well deserved for the value I've gotten from his tools.
Yesterday evening I saw that I had a few new sponsors and was wondering where they had come from.
So in the end something good came of it. The one time donations covered the bill, and I also got a few new monthly sponsors. (Well, unless you also take the hours into account that it took me to move to new hosting, then its way way below minimal wage, but as a maintainer of free software, I am used to that by now.)
Sooo... I guess I should take the opportunity and do a bit of marketing. I am still making a living maintaining Magit et al., so please consider sponsoring my day to day work too. Thanks!
Here's a nice repo with details on how to support them!
https://github.com/tarsius/elisp-maintainers
Also worth pointing out that the author of Magit has made the unusual choice to make a living off developing Emacs packages. I've been happy to pitch in my own hard earned cash in return for the awesomeness that Magit is!
