Amazon Simple Storage Service Availability (S3)

Question

I have a website that attracts about 30,000 visitors per month. It has a lot of photos and PDF files that feed on high bandwidth. It was hosted on 5.com, which offers unlimited bandwidth and storage for ~ $ 5 per month. According to site5 statistics, my site has about 20 GB of downloads per day, but I saw it as 116 GB. It loads from 5 to 15 GB per day. (Although, I really don’t download things every day, so I don’t know where they get these numbers from.)

In anticipation of my site growing even more, perhaps by posting videos, high-resolution photos, etc., I explored other storage options, although site5 was pretty good. In particular, amazon.com Simple Storage Service (S3) looks pretty good and is supposed to be a “highly scalable, reliable, fast, low-cost storage infrastructure.

Using Amazon's Simple Monthly Calculator , I multiplied my worst case scenarios:

Storage: 2 GB Data Transfer-in: 15 GB/day * 31 days = 465 GB/month Data Transfer-out: 116 GB/day * 31 days = 3596 GB/month 

With these numbers alone, the calculator estimates my monthly bill as a whopping $ 658.27 !!! This is madness! Does anyone here use S3? Are your bills outrageous?

Answer 1

Wow, are you sure about these statistics? I suppose this is possible, but you were lucky that your host did not give you a boot. Leasing a dedicated server will usually lead you somewhere around 1.5 TB / month, at least 20 times more than what you are paying now. If you are making 3.5 TB for $ 5 per month and your host is not complaining, don’t even think about moving.

(note: most unlimited plans are really limited by the terms of service of the company, which usually allows them to give someone a download to use "too many" resources.)

I would try to find a way to check your stats before proceeding.

$ 5 / 3,500GB is $ 0,0014 per concert. This is madness.

Answer 2

3.6TB / month is a lot. Just like a performance check, my internet connection seems to deliver about 100 kB / s reception if I'm lucky (I assume the send / receive rat is about the same). With this bandwidth limit, it would take my computer to continuously send 417 days to deliver this amount of data.

10c per gigabyte seems pretty reasonable to me. NearlyFreeSpeech.net charges $ 1 / gigabyte, but decreases to 20 s / gigabyte with large volumes. Mosso is charging 22c / GB.

Answer 3

If you pay $ 5 for unlimited transfer and storage, I will stick with your current provider, as they offer something that no one else can offer you at this price.

S3 is also a content distribution network, has certain guarantees of uptime, data storage guarantees, your host probably does not. When Amazon says they can deliver you 116 GB per day, they really mean it, while your host is likely to resell their features and hope that people do not use their unlimited translation.

You get theft in terms of what you use. Good luck in that other place.