Does Amazon S3 really save money? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#41

Post by trezor » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 8:00 AM UTC

donna wrote: post #3

With AWS i don't have to buy, set up, maintain or upgrade the hardware... or manage employees who do. Nor do i own the hardware. Nor do i have to travel to and from a datacenter. For that service, the cost is very reasonable.

This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though.

I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites.

I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per month, and the number hits I get, I still pay less for my business class shared hosting plan than I would pay for S3.

And I also have full shell access and scriptability.

To top it off my plan actually covers 1TB traffic a month, so my site could scale up to 12 times traffic-wise before I would need to upgrade my account. At that cross-over point Amazon S3 would still be 54% more expensive than my current solution.

This might not apply to everyone, but in my case getting S3 would be plain dumb.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#42

Post by Retric » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 1:17 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #22

That Amazon S3 is cheaper than traditional dedicated servers is a myth that's been spreading for a while now. You can argue all you want about how reliable and convenient it is. But it's not cheaper. In fact, it can be very expensive especially as you consume more bandwidth and storage.

That depends on how steady your demand is. If once a year you spike to 1000x you base load S3 would be cheaper for you.

If your going to keep 3 copy's of 5+ TB over 2 data centers then S3's costs for storage is fairly reasonable but a little pricey. But if your quickly growing you need to compare the month to month cost of data storage vs the cost of new hardware.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#43

Post by barryrandall » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 2:54 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #39

barryrandall wrote: post #6

The problem is that storage costs are a step function. Once you cross a certain threshold (the threshold depends on your performance requirements a.k.a. IOPS), storage gets Really Freaking Expensive (tm). The steps start to get really, really steep as your capacity increases, and that's just for the primary copy of your data. Once you get into truly large data amounts, other things start to break (RAID 5, RAID 6, tap…

Something about your argument is not making sense. You say that as storage needs increase, the costs go up dramatically (that there are significant DISeconomies of scale). Yet Amazon is acting as an aggregator of all those ever-increasing storage needs, operating at even higher scale, yet is able to turn a profit providing a service at scale. Amazon almost certainly isn't building their own hardware. It seems you're…

Sorry, I forgot to mention one of my assumptions...

There are tremendous diseconomies of scale if: you're buying the storage through traditional storage vendors. When your storage needs get really big, you'll realize that stuff is 1) a waste of money, and 2) not meeting your needs (you shape your needs to fit the available products, not vice versa). At that point, it makes enough sense to roll your own storage solution (write your own S3), tailored to your very specific needs.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#44

Post by donna » Wed, Jan 07, 2009, 9:52 PM UTC

trezor wrote: post #41

donna wrote: post #3

With AWS i don't have to buy, set up, maintain or upgrade the hardware... or manage employees who do. Nor do i own the hardware. Nor do i have to travel to and from a datacenter. For that service, the cost is very reasonable.

This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though. I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites. I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per m…

just be aware because you're on a shared host, they may kick you off to a more expensive machine if you start using all that bandwidth.

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#45

Post by rs » Thu, Jan 08, 2009, 6:52 AM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #14

Regarding 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 separa…

That's called "over-selling" - its a pretty common model amongst any resource intensive businesses, which reminded me of a blog entry on the Dreamhost blog where Josh Jones makes a connection between the recent finance market debacle and over-selling: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/10/22/how-to-make-money/

Edit: the blog post is meant for light reading

Re: Does Amazon S3 really save money?

#46

Post by steveis » Thu, Jan 08, 2009, 7:47 PM UTC

trezor wrote: post #41

donna wrote: post #3

With AWS i don't have to buy, set up, maintain or upgrade the hardware... or manage employees who do. Nor do i own the hardware. Nor do i have to travel to and from a datacenter. For that service, the cost is very reasonable.

This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though. I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites. I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per m…

What hosting service are you using, pray tell?