How does Amazon S3 Bandwidth pricing compare to what you're using?

Are you referring to amazon.com? i didn't even know they were in the hosting game if so....

Id be curious to hear the answer to this as well.

Hmm not sure... I've been really wanting to try the server cloud beta though, but I still havnt gotten in. Its amazing stuff. It might really make traditional hosting companies start to sweat if they can keep the price competitive enough.

Looks great if you need to store a lot. I don´t think it´s a solution for average webmasters...

Amazon S3 Simple Storage Solution. Current pricing is 20 cents per gig in downloads. (new pricing takes effect in june). 15 cents per gig to store data.

Actually I think it is ideal for smaller content providers because it has no minium monthly price requirement. I actually was billed for 2 cents last month. so for example if you're going to do 200 GB in traffic/month it'd only cost you $35-$40 instead of having to tax your existing servers, or get some bandwidth plan with a minimum monthly commit.

Also it's a nice solution for a document backups.

The downside is it is a bit tricky to setup unless you know what you're doing.

I forgot one additional feature. When you upload files to the service they are securely stored. You have 3 options for giving accessing them.

-Private access only (no public URL to obtain the file). This is used for storing your files security

-Public access, anyone and their dog can download the file

-Token based access, your server can generate a dynamic download URL that is only valid for a certain amount of time. E.g. a url that is only valid for 10 minutes. This has interesting implications for a way to secure download urls better than the old school .htaccess method.

*NOTE I have no refcodes or anything else to do with Amazon, I just thought it's a pretty compelling technology that is flying below the radar currently.

Waaaaaaayyyyy overpriced compared to what we are used to in the adult world.

Most mainstream companies are used to paying much more so it makes sense for them.

You could just as easily get a cheap virtual plan and make a deal with the host that if you surpass a certain level of use your plan would be bumped up accordingly.

The unique thing about the amazon virtual server cloud, though, is that you can add or remove server instances, on the fly, via the API.

Say you have some virtual webservers on the server cloud and you decide to buy a ton of keywords, or get some huge traffic from some source. Youre server cloud can fire up new instances of your webservers, as the others start to max out CPU. Then once the flood starts to subside, you fire down the other instances, and no longer are charged for them. Sounds like a good way to make a digg proof website;).

I agree that is has some really cool points from a processing standpoint but the average customer that's going to sign up and use the service really doesn't need it.

DreamHost recently increased the disk storage and bandwidth on their shared hosting plans. This got me wondering how it compares to the storage specific service of Amazon S3. To make things easy we?ll use the most expensive month to month costs for DreamHost and ignore the setup fee (there are plenty of coupon codes that will waive that for you). The S3 amounts are constant at $0.15 per GB of storage and $0.20 per GB transferred.

DH: Level 1 (200GB disk, 2TB bandwidth)
DH: $9.95 per month
S3: $30 (0.15 * 200GB) + $400 (0.20 * 2,000GB) = $430 per month

DH: Level 2 (300GB disk, 3TB bandwidth)
DH: $19.95 per month
S3: $45 (0.15 * 300GB) + $600 (0.20 * 3,000GB) = $645 per month

DH: Level 3 (400GB disk, 4TB bandwidth)
DH: $39.95 per month
S3: $60 (0.15 * 400GB) + $800 (0.20 * 4,000GB) = $860 per month

DH: Level 4 (500GB disk, 5TB bandwidth)
DH: $79.95 per month
S3: $75 (0.15 * 500GB) + $1,000 (0.20 * 5,000GB) = $1,075 per month

Please double check my math, because these numbers seem to be a bit on the insane side. It is possible that DreamHost has these huge numbers for each level and hopes that no one ever actually reaches them. If we can assume that both of these companies are able to make money at their respective price points then Amazon is making a killing off of S3.

This isn?t a perfect apples to apples comparison, DreamHost is a general web host, not just a storage provider. You get things like a shell account, MySQL database, etc. Since S3 focuses only on storage they provide a specific API for just that. I know DreamHost uses some sort of network attached storage (NAS) which does hourly snapshots and I?d guess is backed by some sort of RAID array. I?m sure S3 is built on a high availability network and server farm (claims 99.99% availability).

If DreamHost can keep up with performance and availability issues then they appear to be a much better deal than Amazon S3.




Read the rest here:
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/arc...-vs-dreamhost/

So you would be happy to pay.. about $45/Mbps with amazon then? brand names must go a long way.. jesus. It would be good if you have once/few time month large downloads, it would not work good for a content download service.


And Andiz. i would like to know how much of the 2TB for 9.95/month you can get before they kick you off

I love the amazon cloud and s3 storage, I use it for load balancing as it can be turned on and off as needed and its coming from a 220mbps pipe. It's very fast.

Akamai has a 7 billion dollar Market cap, and Limelight is going public soon for several billion dollar as well.

Youtube is one of the major companies utilizing limelight.

I assume there is some reason these guys are worth a few billion more than Dreamhost.

So maybe the S3 differences are uptime and edge caching resulting a very fat pipe for peak bandwidth.

Based on the numbers from Dreamhost though they do appear to beat the socks off S3.

Also, check out Microsoft Live's announcement for silverlight. they're providing 4GB of FREE storage for wmv streaming with unlimited bandwidth currently.

It looks like once it goes out of beta they will either charge for bandwidth, or give the bandwidth for free, but insert ads into the streams.

I'm not rooting for Dreamhost....just posted an interesting view on the whole matter.

Amazon S3 is really interesting and a great service, that's for sure