I’ve been mucking around with Amazon’s S3 Web Service, which is best described as an increasingly versatile hosted, mass storage and inexpensive bit-bucket that can hold images, data, audio, and, well, anything — with some gloriously low costs combined with a reasonably punchy service:
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
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of
Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and
Amazon EC2 is free of charge
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
As we can see, the actual running costs are pretty trivial — and you can work out how much of an impact the service might have on your website revenue, or the hip-pocket by using using the trusty AWS calculator.
Oh, and the logo up top? Served by the very S3 storage mentioned, seamlessly. This may open up options for a return to podcasting, as the costs scale very well and won’t impact my (mt) based storage — indeed I’m looking at moving plugin and theme downloads to s3 as it has some pretty useful advantages.
If you’re looking for inexpensive storage options, check it out.
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of amazon, hosting, s3, storage.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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Aug 7th, 2007 at 4:36 am
As I’m currently having bandwidth issues on .mac, this might prove useful. Ive tried the AWS calculator and if my guesses are correct it’s pretty cheap.
Aug 7th, 2007 at 6:04 am
I’ve moved the plugins and theme across to AWS.
The more I played with it. the more I realised that (mt) is a better web host than storage provider.
My usage is unlikely to break more than a couple gb a month, with < 100,000 hits so the cost is likely to remain in single figure values. That’s pretty hard to beat.
The upside? Load (bandwidth and performance) is removed from hosting - which will keep this site punchy.
AWS seems to have gone through the typical bandwidth issues such enterprises usually hit and right now it is quite acceptable.
It’s an ideal substitute for .mac for a great many things.
Aug 7th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
My site is on (mt) also, and I basically did exactly what you did for exactly the same reasons… moved all my stylesheets and images over to Amazon S3 to distribute load and keep things fast.
Thanks for the link, and let me know if you have any other suggestions for the plugin :)
Aug 7th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Joe, welcome.
Being able to add bucket(s) from the plugin would simplify matters, doubly so as you have now added a one-stop-upload-shop facility - otherwise it’s a pretty solid construct as it stands.