I’m launching this website on January 1st, 2026, after a very busy and eventful 2025. I learned a lot last year, driven mostly by advancements in the AI space. AI—and particularly Claude Code linked with GitHub and AWS—allows one to go from simple idea to online reality in a single day. This let me spin up more projects in 2025 than any other year in the 30 years I’ve been in IT.
Why Static Sites?
One thing I observed is that the performance of static sites cached on AWS CloudFront is remarkably fast compared to Content Management Systems such as WordPress. And if implemented properly, a static site on a Content Delivery Network is much easier to keep online if you achieve your 15 minutes of fame and the whole world beats a path to your door.
With a CMS like WordPress, a traffic spike can overwhelm your database and crash your site. With a static site on CloudFront, the same content is served from edge locations worldwide—there’s no database to overload, no server to crash.
The Cost
Here’s what global delivery actually costs for a text-focused blog:
| Component | Monthly Estimate |
|---|---|
| Domain Registration ($13/year) | $1.08 |
| S3 Storage (100MB of HTML/CSS/fonts) | $0.01 |
| S3 Requests (10,000 PUTs/month for deploys) | $0.05 |
| CloudFront Data Transfer (5GB/month) | $0.43 |
| CloudFront Requests (100,000/month) | $0.10 |
| Route 53 Hosted Zone | $0.50 |
| ACM Certificate | Free |
| Total | ~$2.17/month |
Even at 10x that traffic (1 million requests, 50GB transfer), you’re looking at around $5–8/month. Compare that to managed WordPress hosting at $20–50/month—and you get better performance.
Building With AI
My intent with this blog is to document one issue per day—every day that I can—and have that content available very fast everywhere in the world.
To build this site, I asked Claude what my choices were for maintaining a static site that could act and appear like a CMS-driven site. It recommended Hugo, a fast static site generator written in Go.
I wanted a theme with the appearance of a newspaper. There wasn’t one readily available, so Claude helped me create one called Broadsheet, which we’ve made available on GitHub as open source.
The Result
That’s how I started a globally fast blog with minimal investment on the first day of 2026:
- Build time: ~15 milliseconds
- Global delivery: CloudFront edge locations worldwide
- Monthly cost: Under $5
- Time from idea to launch: One day
If you’re considering starting a blog or news site, I’d encourage you to explore static site generators. The performance difference is remarkable, and the cost savings are substantial.