So true. Though I think a lot of the insecurity comes from not knowing what is actually the norm. When I started out I thought people were kidding, that it was all a big joke, when they told me their hourly wages. Turns out you actually need to bump your prices up quite a bit for it to compensate for all "non-work" stuff.
I'm hoping this article can however slightly help shift the norm for some newly started developer, so maybe they can take the step and ask for more.
That's definitely an option and to be fair I didn't use any Jekyll plugins up until recently. But my main gripe is still the lacking redirection. I can't lose that ability for this blog and all its accumulated URL fixes over the years.
For new blogs I could definitely consider GitHub Pages. In fact I use it for one I started just a month ago.
I have found it to be fun the first few times, but as your blog grows I've found it to be a pain to deploy every time I make a small correction. Also, with markdown there are always corrections to be made for formatting purposes.
I was watching a demo of Jekyll and Octopress pushed to github at a user group meeting. As a demo, the presenter made the requisite small change, committed, and pushed.
5 MB of upload later on a clogged wifi link, it was up live. Admittedly, that's because the generation was done on his laptop and pushed up, not done on the server side. But 5mb and a ton of rendering time is going to suck if you're ever changing things for formatting, or edit anything.
Check out Amazon's pricing pages ([1] and [2]) for details.
As for resources spent, my own blog has had just over 10k pageviews since Saturday when I launched on S3/CF and for that I'm paying $0.07 (S3) + $0.12 (CF) = a whooping $0.19! Including a lot of writing files back and forth to get everything up and running.
The rate at which these generators pop up is a testament to how awesome they are. I really think you're on to something with the built-in S3 deployment. Any plans for extending it with CloudFront caching?
WWWizer is pretty cool, but I'd rather roll my own on Heroku. I have a Heroku "app" that Heroku thinks is PHP, but it just contains a .htaccess file with some RewriteRule directives to 301 http://example.com to http://www.example.com. I then do the real hosting elsewhere. :)
You could set it up to either accept clients to POST a user to the /users collection, or PUT a user at /users/123. With unknown IDs the latter isn't really viable.
This is primarily a matter of idempotence. Several POSTs to /users would create many identical users whereas multiple PUTs to /users/123 would have exactly the same result as just one request. The PUT is idempotent.
I'm hoping this article can however slightly help shift the norm for some newly started developer, so maybe they can take the step and ask for more.