Not quite understanding deployment

Hello. I'm new here, and considering switching my website from Octopress to Grav. One thing I am really not understanding is deployment. If I install Grav locally on my Mac, can I just deploy the resulting flat files to the S3 bucket that currently hosts my site?

I'd also like, if possible, to use DropBox and take advantage of being able to edit from anywhere, but I don't understand how the files get from DropBox to the host.

I'm not a developer (as you can tell) so if I have this all wrong, please be gentle with me.

Thanks.

It really depends on your S3 image.

If your image is running a webserver with PHP and the appropriate PHP requirements (as outlined in the Grav docs) then yes it should run fine. Although I have no experience with Grav on S3, I have had great success with other VPS solutions like Digital Ocean

Another alternative is to use Vagrant to develop your site locally, then just deploy the Vagrant box to S3. Here is a blog post about getting Grav running on Vagrant.

To use Dropbox you will need to install Dropbox on your server. Here's a blog post on getting Dropbox/Grav setup locally then you just need to install Dropbox for linux and configure that to point to the same folder.

Actually Amazon S3 is just a storage service, maybe Andy confused it with Amazon EC2.
You need a web server with PHP installed to run Grav, it's not like Octopress which just generates some static pages and you upload them on any disk storage.

Ah yes, sorry about that, I was totally thinking of EC2, which is their VPS type solution.

Thank you flaviocopes. I think I'll have a little play locally using MAMP and then seek hosting elsewhere if I decide to make a go of it. Being able to use a DropBox folder is very attractive.