Can someone please tell me how Amazon's S3 Service is cheaper than a regular host?

[Pornwolf]

Amazon has a bunch of services that are getting a lot of press now a days.

One of the services is called S3 - Simple Storage Solution (basically it's a big cloud server)

Here's the pricing info:

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

We charge less where our costs are less, thus some prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the location of the bucket.

United States

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

How is this something to get excited about? Especially since it still goes down from time to time like a regular host.

All of the new tech startups planned to use this service as if it's the best thing ever created. What's the benefit to this?

I've been getting cheaper bandwidth than this since 2002. It only seems like a good idea for 2.0 companies that act as file hosts.

[Iron Fist]

And no adult content i'm assuming....

[NinjaSteve]

When people first started talking about it I took a look and immediately stopped because I agree that the prices are a bit high.

[TidalWave]

No advantage and like you said it has plenty of downtimes as well

[denny007]

It is for larger projects, also lot of companies use it as backup storage + you can redirect there some computing + bandwidth during peak hours.

it has plenty of downtimes as well

Not that many, comparable with regular host

Here some math of one customer who actually saves lot of money with it:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11...-me-the-money/

[sacX]

well..

1. infinite storage (no need to get extra drives or worry about backing up the stuff)
2. pay just for what you use (a lot of people don't use the plan they're paying for)
3. high availability (ok this one is in theory, but it should be more reliable than your everyday host)

so those things appeal to companies that are growing quickly so they don't have to deploy a whole lot of servers.

It's also quite cool to just hook it up as a network drive and drop stuff in it, to keep a remote backup somewhere that should be secure.

4. oh also, don't forget your hardware costs are $0 so you should figure that into your bandwidth calculations

[Pornwolf]

That is a plus. I guess coming from porn I am looking at things more from a high traffic standpoint instead of the high storage, high CPU but low traffic way a lot of the Web 2.0 companies are looking at it.

[GrouchyAdmin]

It has multiple points where your data is guaranteed to be setup and copied to. It's somewhat Geo-centralized if you use the S3/US, and data transfer is free to EC2 if you use both in the US datacenters.

The things that suck: Buckets. 100 max; don't group by site name or preformer if you plan on using it. You can override a mime type, but you must explicitly do so at the time of PUT. Limited.

Things that don't suck: It's still relatively cheap, you don't worry about keeping it backed up, stable, or online. It's kind of nerdy-cool.

[WiredGuy]

Is there any way to run private software on their servers? Not apache based, but running scripts that do web requests?
WG

[jay23]

Originally Posted by WiredGuy

Is there any way to run private software on their servers? Not apache based, but running scripts that do web requests?
WG

Yes, look at the Amazon virtual server option. You build an image upload it and run it....you can run as many as you may want. Only Linux is supported, no windows. The servers can talk to S3 for storage

Jay

[WiredGuy]

Originally Posted by jay23

Yes, look at the Amazon virtual server option. You build an image upload it and run it....you can run as many as you may want. Only Linux is supported, no windows. The servers can talk to S3 for storage

Jay

I was looking to run perl scripts on them and being billed for the bw usage. They'd need to be some somewhat powerful machines, virtual won't cut it.
WG

[rowan]

Originally Posted by denny007

Here some math of one customer who actually saves lot of money with it:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/11...-me-the-money/

Interesting, considering they're phasing out local storage they are now completely placing their livelihood and longevity into the hands of a third party... then again I guess those RAID arrays were already sitting at a webhost, but at least they owned the hardware (and implicitly, access to the content on it). What happens if S3 goes bust tomorrow?

[rowan]

EC2 looks very interesting, particularly because it seems you can add and remove "virtual server" instances on demand with an API. A single virtual server would cost about $70 a month before bandwidth, but you could just as easily temporarily add on 10 or 100 extra for a few peak hours per day if/when it's needed. You pay for the hours each virtual server is around, not a monthly fee.

[jay23]

Originally Posted by WiredGuy

I was looking to run perl scripts on them and being billed for the bw usage. They'd need to be some somewhat powerful machines, virtual won't cut it.
WG

You can get as many VM as you want, Amazon says each VM is equal to 1.75 Ghz single CPU. The nice thing is that you can get 1 VM or 1000 by the hour and no setup fee.

Also I use softlayer.com for encoding, we got about 100 servers all clustered ...bit more complex, shoot me an email if you want more info.

[djscrib]

It's a lightweight edge caching solution. Meaning if you have 1 hit/day or 10million hits/day you wind up with nothing more than a larger bill. When you're talking about building your own 24x7 ENTERPRISE infrastructure, and managing it yourself, allowing a CDN to do it for you becomes very attractive.

Uptime is very good (despite complaints), your data isn't going to be lost, and there is no minimum fee.

They allow adult content, just nothing illegal.

And to the guy who's worried about S3 (Amazon) going out of business, I'm going to bet they're in business longer than you are.


The VM service doesn't work that great for web hosting because the IP of the servers change all the time. It was really built for doing bulk processing.

They also have a new service in Beta, which is a Simple DB. Again, infinately scalable, high uptime database service which could prove very interesting.

Again, if you don't have enough traffic to max out a good server, amazon isn't for you.

When you start dumping money into RAID 5 drives, web farms, and hardware load balancers, than the S3 advantage becomes clear very quickly.

There is in fact a reason that almost all large companies use a CDN in some way shape or form.

[rowan]

I remember seeing nearly half a rack full of 1RU Akamai servers at an ISP several years ago. At the time transit bandwidth in Australia was very expensive so placing the content caches so close to the customers saved both the ISP and the CDN big $$$. It was a win for everyone except the upstream provider.

[raymor]

Yeah I would have thought they could have done better with the pricing.
Those prices are a little higher than what we charge for our somewhat
similar service, and our service has significant added value compared
to their offering. Rather than just storage, our CloneBox gives you an exact
duplicate of your primary web server which takes over and serves up your
site any time there is a problem with your primary server, four level rolling
backups, etc. and can also be used for storage. With the S3 service you COULD
redirect some processing there during peak hours - with CloneBox that's all
automated and the pricing is a lower if you're using hundreds of GBs.
I would that thought that with all of their resources they could outdo us but
it doesn't look like it.