As it happens, that is what I went with. My budget is ~0 (I’m doing this as a favor, and whatever it costs comes out of my pocket, and it’s somebody’s art thing, not exactly a profit-magnet; but if I end up exceeding the free tier, I’ll be OK.)
(Just in case anybody else cares why I chose why I did):
I ran into a bit of a squeeze between ‘proper’ web hosting (which is still pretty cheap, for what you get, if this were my hobby thing, giving Dreamhost the equivalent of ~2pints/decent beer per month for a domain name and hosting service wouldn’t strike me as unreasonable); and ‘free’ web hosting (which, in the case of some of the ‘for education’ offerings isn’t even ad-laden; but is pretty much 100% built around the assumption that you’ll be blogging/Content Management System-ing, and so automatically includes so much style cruft that it makes doing even the vaguely involved scripting for something like a Google Map with custom KML overlays either impossible(if the safety filters are too agressive about those external scripts and resources being loaded), or beyond my feeble skill (if it isn’t formally forbidden; but I need to integrate it all into the pre-canned style without breaking things rather than just opening a full-tab nothing-but-map from scratch).
Amazon had the nice feature of being free (and ramping up in cost very slowly, I’m serving the HTML page and the KML overlay, so 1 ‘view’ of the map counts as two ‘gets’, so I get 2,500 views/month for free, and 5 cents per additional 2,500 views, with the option to just pull the plug if it somehow goes viral and actually starts costing noticeable money; but, since Amazon’s ‘free’ tier is basically just a sales pitch for some industrial-strength ‘cloud’ stuff, minor little things like 'specify absolutely whatever MIME type you need to, per file, are totally doable, and serving raw chunks of HTML is trivial, rather than hidden behind a CMS(often this would be bad, for this specific project it isn’t).
I didn’t have time to compare Google and MS’s offerings in the same vein; but I can see why VMware alternates between bombastic jingoism about ‘that company that sells books’ and wetting themselves in fear.
I could have gotten the same level of control (and substantially more bandwidth/freedom to ‘just throw it up there, it isn’t metered’) from Dreamhost or other ‘traditional’; but, as said, my budget for this one is a little…awkward. If I need to, I can shell out; but I’d rather not if I can help it, and the person that I’m doing it for isn’t really a good enough friend/acquaintance to necessarily avoid awkwardness if she discovers that I unilaterally shelled out a bunch to make her project work. Amazon’s ‘probably free, maybe a cup of coffee or two’ expected price range is much more suitable to this specific occasion.
(Oh, One Thing To Note about S3: their documentation doesn’t really call attention to this; but their system, at least the manual console, will happily and without the slightest comment allow you to create buckets that are invalid and will necessarily fail later. Is ‘foo.bar’ a valid name for a bucket? Nope, the dot screws it up. Can you create bucket foo.bar, and spend a bunch of time configuring it before you hit a step where it will say ‘bucket is invalid’ and nothing else? Yes. Not. That. I’m. Bitter. Mixed case is also a no-no; but you wouldn’t know it from the complete lack of protest when you create a mixed case bucket.
I don’t need to be coddled every step of the way; but is rejecting invalid input when entered, rather than happily accepting it and cryptically failing 25 minutes later during an apparently unrelated step really the best we can do?)
