Skip to content
aidan

Why I left AWS for a personal site

2 min read
  • aws
  • vercel
  • infra
  • opinion

I had a personal site running on AWS. It cost more than my Spotify subscription.

That's not really AWS's fault — it's mine. I gave a static site a production-grade architecture because I could, not because I should have. CloudFront, S3, ACM, Route 53, the occasional Lambda doing essentially nothing. The bill was small in absolute terms and large in "did I really need any of this" terms.

I moved to Vercel. The site now costs nothing and ships faster.

What I actually changed

  1. The whole infra. There's no infra now.
  2. The DNS. Namecheap → Vercel's nameservers in five minutes.
  3. The mental tax. I don't worry about cert renewal, cache invalidation, or whether a Lambda quietly errored at 2am.

What you might still pick AWS for

If you have a side project that needs:

  • Multi-region failover
  • Fine-grained IAM
  • A whole VPC's worth of private services
  • An actual product with actual customers

…then AWS still earns its keep. For a portfolio with three pages and a blog? It was theatre.

The lesson, I think, is that infrastructure choices have a kind of gravity. Once you've set them up, they pull every decision toward themselves. "I have ECS, so this should probably be a container." "I have Step Functions, so this should be a workflow." Sometimes the right move is to delete the gravity well entirely and ship the boring thing.