Affordability of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Question

I have a website that attracts about 30,000 visitors per month. It has a lot of photos and PDF files which eat up a good deal of bandwidth. It's hosted by site5.com, which offers unlimited bandwidth & storage for ~$5 per month. According to site5's statistics, my site has about 20 GB of downloads per day, but I've seen it as high as 116 GB. Uploads range from 5-15 GB daily. (Though, I don't really upload things everyday, so I don't know where they get those numbers from.)

In anticipation of growing my site even more, perhaps by hosting videos, high-res photos, etc., I was looking into other storage options, even though site5 has been pretty good. Specifically, amazon.com's Simple Storage Service (S3) looks pretty good and is supposed to be a "highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure."

Using Amazon's Simple Monthly Calculator, I multiplied out my worst-case scenario numbers:

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 those numbers alone, the calculator estimates my monthly bill to be a whopping $658.27!!! That's insane! Is anyone here using S3? Are your bills outrageous?

Answer 1

3.6TB/month is kind of a lot. Just as a sanity-check, my internet connection seems to deliver somewhere around 100kB/sec reception if I'm lucky (I assume the send/receive rat are about the same). At that bandwidth limit it would take my computer 417 days sending continuously to deliver that amount of data.

10c per gigabyte seems pretty reasonable to me. NearlyFreeSpeech.net charges $1/gigabyte delivered but that decreases to 20c/gigabyte at high volumes. Mosso charges 22c/GB delivered.

Answer 2

If you are paying $5 for unlimited transfer and storage I would stick with your current provider as they are offering something that no-one else is going to be able to offer you for that price.

S3 is also a content distribution network, it has certain uptime guarantees, data storage guarantees, your host probably does not. When Amazon says they can deliver your 116 GB a day they really mean it, whereas your host is probably overselling their capacity and hoping people don't really use their unlimited transfer.

You are getting a steal in terms of what you use. Good luck finding that elsewhere.

Answer 3

Wow, are you sure about those stats? I suppose that's possible, but you're lucky that your host hasn't given you the boot. Leasing a dedicated server will typically get you somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5TB/month for at least 20 times what you are paying now. If you're doing 3.5TB for $5 per month and your host isn't complaining, don't even think about moving.

(note: most unlimited plans are indeed limited by the company's terms of service, which usually allows them to give anyone the boot for using "too many" resources.)

I would try to find some way to verify your stats before you continue.

$5/3500GB is $0.0014 per gig. That's insane.