I use S3 for small things... it can't be beat if you only need to back up a few gigs. I agree, though, that once you scale up it gets pretty expensive. I host my own backups for the heavy stuff. (there are other providers willing to host your backups for cheaper as well, if you are willing to buy in terrabyte-size chunks)
Does Amazon S3 really save money?
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#12The reason is that you don't have to deal with it. Amazon isn't magic and they use the same hardware available to everyone else. Sure, there's some scale involved when it comes to labor and power and bandwidth, but they can't undercut what you can do yourself. However, spraying files everywhere is a pain! MogileFS makes it a lot better, but you're still in charge of monitoring it and making sure it's healthy. With on…
Thank you for such a detailed and reasoned answer. I'm learning a hell of a lot from this thread already.
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#13James Hamilton posted a fairly robust model of how to think about this (and evaluate S3), just prior to joining Amazon.
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/22/TheCostOfBulkCol...
His is a more datacenter-level view (considering $/GB, from the perspective of arbitrary GB), but builds a convincing case why S3 @ $0.18/GB is fair).
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#14Regarding those services that offer "unlimited storage", I think they are really banking on the fact that many people _won't_ use enough space to cause the company a loss. Sure, there are heavy users, but when it all averages out, the company (hopefully) makes money.
Also, you have to read the terms of some services closely. IIRC, some of the online backup services are limited to "personal use only". They have separate pricing tiers for business backup (because they know those customers will use more).
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#15The reason is that you don't have to deal with it. Amazon isn't magic and they use the same hardware available to everyone else. Sure, there's some scale involved when it comes to labor and power and bandwidth, but they can't undercut what you can do yourself. However, spraying files everywhere is a pain! MogileFS makes it a lot better, but you're still in charge of monitoring it and making sure it's healthy. With on…
Thank you for such a detailed and reasoned answer. I'm learning a hell of a lot from this thread already.
Well, I think what it really comes down to is what your business is. If your business is storage, get good at doing your own storage. If your business is web applications, get good at web applications. Then there are companies on the cusp. Flickr is clearly storage heavy enough that they need to be a storage company. 37signals, on the other hand, stores attachments and some pictures, but it their primary function isn't storage - it's the interaction with that stored content.
Is storage such a thing for your business that you're willing to put a lot of labor behind its solution? Or is storage important to your business, but as long as you get something reliable it doesn't have to be the most efficient possible because it's a small part of your business relative to the other things you do (like HTML, CSS, Ruby/Python/Perl/et al., MySQL/PostgreSQL)? Your time might be better spent on other company work than on storage.
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#16SmugMug's cheapest plan is $40/year, which is $3.33 a month
S3's most expensive tier is $0.15gb/mo
So, not counting bandwidth, a user would have to store roughly 22GB of images to eat up that cost.
Being conservative, a high-res JPEG out of camera (12mp) is probably 3mb on average. So, we're talking about over 7,000 images.
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#17You forget management costs -- someone has to deal with this storage, service the computers, replace the drives, add them, add additional computers, etc.
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#18The reason is that you don't have to deal with it. Amazon isn't magic and they use the same hardware available to everyone else. Sure, there's some scale involved when it comes to labor and power and bandwidth, but they can't undercut what you can do yourself. However, spraying files everywhere is a pain! MogileFS makes it a lot better, but you're still in charge of monitoring it and making sure it's healthy. With on…
+1 for "I'm as cheap as the next person, but I also like sleep."
Pretty much sums it up.
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#19SmugMug's cheapest plan is $40/year, which is $3.33 a month S3's most expensive tier is $0.15gb/mo So, not counting bandwidth, a user would have to store roughly 22GB of images to eat up that cost. Being conservative, a high-res JPEG out of camera (12mp) is probably 3mb on average. So, we're talking about over 7,000 images.
FYI, most people using high-res DLSR's are storing data in .raw format, instead of a lossy (jpeg) format.
My 12.8MP Canon EOS5D produces .RAW files of around 13MB each. I don't store in .jpg, but generally post-process a jpg thumbnail and mid-size image to make browsing my photo catalog easier (or for emailing samples).
Edits to pics are always saved as a sub-rev, so it's not uncommon for all the files associated with an image to add up to 20-40MB. This is fairly standard for anyone who shoots for $$ (full time, or for a hobby as I do).
Anyway, kind of off topic, but your 3mb number is too low :)
Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?
#20Whenever you outsource anything to an "as a service" company, there are a couple of sweet spots where it makes sense, and a (generally) larger area where it does not make sense to pay someone else to do the service for you.
Amazon makes sense for companies that are too small to dedicate an admin to a server and/or to load that server and bandwidth to 60%+ capacity. At some point, when you have a need for a small server farm and the uptime of those servers is core to your business you will likely find it is more cost effective to do the operations in-house.
Think about companies like Salesforce.com, for their datacenter needs, I don't think you could ever justify Amazon (or a similar) service.
As a rule of thumb, I charge customers in my colo facility $60/U/mo as a starting price. You get a shared pipe and relatively unmetered/unlimited bandwidth (for "business" use, no torrent hosting or stupid shit). For a little more you can get dedicated bandwidth, 95% billing, etc. I've got someone who is looking at bringing in a 3U backup server, they'll pay $200/mo to have 3mb dedicated bandwidth and the colo space. That server will have a few TB of data replicated from their main site, I don't think S3 would make sense for them.