Q:

Alternative to heroku or google app engine for static files

I'm creating a simple site for my family and which is basically just static files (I don't want a CMS).
I've tried using heroku and google app engine but heroku wind down the server which yields a 30s delay on some requests and google app engine takes up to 500ms to serve a static page.
So my question is, are there any alternatives to heroku and google app engine for hosting content in the cloud.
It does not have to be free but I'd like to keep the costs to less than $10 per month.
I could always just rent a regular VPS or something similar but in my experience they can be much worse than app engine when it comes to serving files.

I've tested a local server running nginx vs app engine and it seems like app engine is performing rather well, it's approx 500ms behind the local server but since it uses a CDN it will probably be faster for subsequent requests.

A:

Well, one possibility is Amazon's static website hosting over S3 together with a CNAME mapping.
The S3 latency isn't super low either. If your site is popular (so that caches would be likely to not evict your content) then you could experiment with adding Amazon Cloudfront CDN (i.e. edge proxy caching).

