Which is the easiest cloud for static web content

Question

I've got a few HTML pages with the requisite images, css and other bits and pieces, all static content no CGI required. I currently host it on an Amazon EC2 image that I need to have up and running for a different application. Ideally I'd like to move the hosting of the static content off the EC2 image so that it's independent of any single EC2 instance. I'd like to host it on one of the free or at least pay as you go cloud options.

The options I've come across are:

1. Windows Azure, in this case I haven't been able to get .html pages working and even if it is possible would it mean I'd have to update the whole Windows Azure app everytime I needed to update an image? Or is there an easy way static web content could be served up from Azure blobs?

2. Amazon's S3, I think I'd have to put fully qualified URL's into each HTML page for each image, css etc. file but that wouldn't be too bad. This seems like a reasonable option.

3. Google's App Engine, only spent 10 minutes looking at it but it seems like it would work as well.

4. Wordpress, I could just incorporate the HTML into a wordpress blog site but I find the themes a little bit too restrictive, pages can only be so wide etc.

Is there an easier way?

Update:

After some further investigation the two best ways I found are the S3 approach as described by Sug and Windows Azure Blob storage (rather than a Windows Azure service).

The difference between S3 and Azure Blobs is how the CNAME can be managed:

• For S3 you'll end up with a CNAME like mybucket.mydomain.com
• For Azure you'll end up with a CNAME like *.mydomain.com where * represents whatever you like. To access blobs the path is then *.mydomain.com/container/.

So S3 dictates the CNAME host but gives full flexibility on the resource path. Azure gives full flexibility on the CNAME host but dictates the first part of the resource path.

Answer 1

There's also akamai. However I don't know anything about their pricing. If someone does I'd be interested to know.

Answer 2

For serving only static files, using services like AppEngine or Azure will be over kill.
The simplest solution will be to use AWS S3:
1) No coding required
2) Pricing
3) You can easily map a bucket to your own domain or subdomain.
4) Free client tools to manage your buckets as it was dead simple filesystem.
I personally use S3Fox but there are many others (BucketExplorer is another example)

Answer 3

For simple sites like this, I've had good experiences with Nearly Free Speech.Net.

Answer 4

“S3 dictates the CNAME host”

Amazon has a CDN service called CloudFront, that uses an S3 bucket for storage. You only pay for S3 data transfer (I think).

Your bucket contents are copied to Amazon’s CDN, meaning superfast access from around the world. However, because it’s a CDN, files are automatically cached for a long time (so there’s a delay when re-naming or deleting files).

Just using an S3 bucket, and setting up another domain to point to the bucket via a CNAME, might be the best idea.