Amazon S3: when/why [closed]

Answer 1

The advantages of Amazon S3 are reliability, scalability, speed and cost. Here is some info on each.

Reliability: Amazon stores your data in multiple data centers. If there was a disaster and one data center was destroyed your content would continue to be served from the second data center. It’s very unlikely that data you upload to Amazon would ever be lost.

Scalability: If one of your web sites becomes popular and millions of people visit the site, your web server will not be able to handle the load. In comparison when you upload your files to Amazon they are stored in multiple locations. If the load on your content grows your files are automatically replicated to more servers so your files will always be available.

Speed: Amazon has a service called CloudFront that works in conjunction with Amazon S3. When you activate CloudFront on your S3 content your content is moved to edge locations. These are servers that make your content available for high speed transfer.

Cost: With Amazon S3 you only pay for what you use. If you have a few files that get little traffic you will only pay a few cents a month.

SprightlySoft has a blog post which gives even more reasons why Amazon S3 is great. Read it at http://sprightlysoft.com/blog/?p=8

Answer 2

It's not really directly related to your actual hosting of web sites, but it's certainly an important part of it, especially if the sites don't belong to you alone -- S3 is a great backup solution. There are tools such as duplicity that can automatically and efficiently back things up onto S3 for you, and it's extremely cheap for this purpose. I back up a fairly large amount of data for less than $1/month.

Answer 3

For small sites, S3 or Mosso may not be that reasonable for image hosting, but if you have any video files (.wmv, .flv, etc...) or large downloads (app distributions, etc..), I'd still put them on S3 or Mosso to save potential bandwidth spikes if for some odd reason, your content becomes wildly popular.

Answer 4

I'd say that there's no reason if your base hosting plan provides enough space/bandwidth. Where I think it's useful is when your file transfers become enough that you have to look at buying an add-on of storage/bandwidth from the provider -- in that case, S3 may be a viable alternative. But if I'm paying $X/month and not using all of the storage, there's no upside to it.

On the other hand, if your capacity planning calls for you to someday exceed the provider's limits, S3 may be a good solution from the start so you don't have files being served from multiple places.

Answer 5

if you're running within the included storage and bandwidth of your server and your needs are being served well, you are already doing the simplest thing that is working for you and that is where you should always start. Off the top of my head I can think of a couple reasons why you may want to move some storage to S3 in the future:

• Your storage or bandwidth needs grow beyond what you have and S3 is cheaper than upgrading your current solution
• You move to a multiple-dedicated-server solution for failover/performance reasons and want to be able to store your assets in a single shared location
• Your bandwidth needs are highly variable (so you can avoid a monthly fee when you're not getting traffic) [Thanks Jim, from the comments]

Answer 6

If you're hosting a high-traffic site, the bandwidth cost (and latency issues) of hosting images yourself makes S3 and other services like Akami attractive. For a low-traffic site, it probably isn't an issue.