Static Website hosting can be a bit expensive for what you are actually need. You usually have two choices between paying for a share in a webserver or hosting a webserver yourself. There are downsides to both options.
Sharing a webserver means you normally have a good connection but you might struggle sometimes if loads increase. You are also paying a nice regular amount for something you are not really using much.
Doing it yourself is a pain. You have to have a server and a good connection and keep it running.
Now there is a third way.
Recently, Amazon CloudFront switched on the default root option. Previously, if you used S3 or Cloudfront you still had to have a webserver to serve up your index.html file and then you could put the rest on S3/Cloudfront and it would server on Amazons massive infrastructure. The costs where trivial (especially for small loads). But the problem was having to still have to serve the first file (index.html), so you may as well just serve the rest with the index file.
But the new default root option now allows you to set a default file for your website.
So I have done it. If you are reading this them you are seeing my site hosted on Cloudfront/S3. If you type www.clockworkapps.com it now defaults to www.clockworkapps.com/index.html.
So my static website costs are going to cost me a few dollars per month to host and 10 USD per year for the host name. Much better than the couple of hundred dollars I was paying before this.
Setting this up was a snap. Just sign up for S3 and Cloudfront. Use something like Cyberduck (great free program for OS X) to create your bucket. You can use it to create your distribution file for cloudfront. Finally you need to get a recent "night build" of Cyberduck to set the root default.
All you have to do then is point your CNAME to the Cloudfront distribution.
I am using Google Apps for my custom email (so the email is free)!
There are a couple of tricks so if anyone wants more info let me know!!