This is going to be a random comment, but the thing that struck me most was how close this person's Github username is to my own! github.com/chrxr vs github.com/chrxh. Feels bizarre. And seeing their actual name it appears there username has the same relationship to their real name as my own username.
I think this is catering to a specific audience who is not me :) I actually find that the complexity of self hosting is the interesting part.
I did this to learn stuff. Seeing as I have little to say, my blog site is more of a technical playground than a valuable store of content.
I omitted that between the EC2 version and this current version, I built a really convoluted version with an ALB, Aurora, always-on ECS etc. That came to $80 a month. So then that motivated me to go the other way with the super cheap option.
I recently moved my personal website (https://chrxr.com) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion.
I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up.
I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $15 per month to ~$1-2 per month. All I'm paying for is <1mb S3 storage, a single route 53 hosted zone, and one image in an ECR repo.
If I want to add content, I spin up the ECS task again and work away. Note that part of the reason for such a low cost is my website get VERY little traffic :)
Apart from the cost, I also have the advantage that it's lightning quick most of the time, with caching provided by CloudFront.
TTS is great for 40k, although moving a large amount of pieces can be a pain. There are a huge amount of model scans available, and the community has put an immense amount of effort into building battlefields. I have mixed feelings about the morality of getting this stuff for free. I say mixed because the price of actual GW models is criminal. However, I don't think this takes much profit from GW. It certainly hasn't prevented me from wanting to paint models and play in person. But with that currently being impossible, TTS and Warhammer Total War are my only outlets.