> What exactly are the benefits over simply setting up nginx if not simplicity?
We weren't fully aware of these limitations when we decided to host our site on S3. Had we been, we may have just used nginx.
There are obviously a ton of benefits to S3 and Cloudfront, it's just than in practice you can't really get them if you need Google to index your site. And while Google claims they can now execute javascript and include async content, in practice this isn't true for any real Angular or React site.
And even if every search engine were to magically execute js correctly, you'd still need to prerender your site in order for Facebook and Twitter to populate the preview cards for your site with the proper headline, summary, and image.
You should keep in mind that S3 really is an object storage. It's named as such, advertised as such, priced as such and the limitations you're hitting are because it's built as such.
It does work if you want to host a static site, and it's nice that they offer a bunch of extra niceties to help make those work... but expecting things like user-agent-specific redirects is a bit much for what's essentially a filesystem.
I mean they let you put S3 behind Cloudfront with a TLS cert. Having read through all the documentation, hundreds of blog posts, etc., I've seen absolutely nothing that indicates that S3 + Cloudfront isn't meant for serious web hosting.
Amen! Have been baffled by the urge to move stuff to S3 for app hosting. I understand the convenience (sort of) and the scalability aspects (mostly) but you seem to lose loads of functionality.
Do Angular sites seem to render correctly in Google Webmaster tools but they aren't actually indexed properly unless you have pre-rendered pages served? I'm curious since when I ask Google to index a specific page it shows everything properly loaded/rendered and I was under the impression that was also being indexed.
We weren't fully aware of these limitations when we decided to host our site on S3. Had we been, we may have just used nginx.
There are obviously a ton of benefits to S3 and Cloudfront, it's just than in practice you can't really get them if you need Google to index your site. And while Google claims they can now execute javascript and include async content, in practice this isn't true for any real Angular or React site.
And even if every search engine were to magically execute js correctly, you'd still need to prerender your site in order for Facebook and Twitter to populate the preview cards for your site with the proper headline, summary, and image.