A company hosts images of historical events. Users search and view images by the year the event occurred. On average, each image is requested only once or twice per year. The company wants a highly available, cost-effective solution to store and deliver the images. Which solution is MOST cost-effective?

The most cost-effective solution is to store images in Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and deliver them directly using S3 static website hosting. S3 Standard-IA is designed for data that is accessed less frequently but requires rapid access when needed, which aligns with the scenario of images being requested only once or twice per year. S3 static website hosting is a highly available and cost-effective way to serve static content directly from S3. Storing images on Amazon EBS or EFS with an EC2 web server would be significantly more expensive due to the continuous cost of EC2 instances and the storage costs of EBS or EFS, which are not optimized for infrequently accessed data. While S3 Standard is a viable option, S3 Standard-IA offers lower storage costs for infrequently accessed data, making it more cost-effective in this specific use case.