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This must be an incredible benefit to companies like Imgur or Dropbox where a significant portion of their costs must be S3 storage.
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
EDIT: Example: We use Akamai as our caching layer, as their bandwidth costs are much less than Cloudfront (their analytics are better as well, and they don't charge for invalidations like Cloudfront does). We use S3 as the origin as its a lower cost per GB than Akamai's NetStorage, and the S3 API is superior to work with compared to the interfaces exposed by NetStorage (scp/ftp/rsync).
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
This must be an incredible benefit to companies like Imgur or Dropbox where a significant portion of their costs must be S3 storage.
Also, I wonder if EC2 is up for a price tweak soon too?
EDIT: Ah - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284
Key quote: "We are lowering S3 storage prices by 36% to 65%, effective April 1st, 2014." http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
Unless you're storing massive amounts of data, no point in using Glacier now, as it's still $0.01/GB (vs $0.03/GB for standard durability). And wow. Hell of a price drop.
I've seen Internet Archive and Backblaze estimates that indicate $60-100/TB-storage installation and $7/TB-year in power. If drives last 5 years, we could expect a commodity cloud-storage price around $20/TB-year? One order of magnitude to go.
This must be an incredible benefit to companies like Imgur or Dropbox where a significant portion of their costs must be S3 storage.
It must, but I assume once you get to a certain level of usage then an account manager / AWS gets you a slightly better than the publicly published deal. Is that the case? Also, I wonder if EC2 is up for a price tweak soon too? EDIT: Ah - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284
My concern is what it always been for AWS, no first party support for limiting my bill. The best effort from AWS is just an email notification when they "think" my bill is over a limit. If I can't limit my risk to a surprise bill of thousands of dollars after missing a midnight email, I still can't use their service at any usage based price other than free.
For example, what if you have set up a bunch of auto-scaling instances to handle heavy load. During the middle of the night, your application suddenly goes viral in Indonesia or Brazil or some other large country in a different timezone from yours.
Your bill goes over its threshold - what does Amazon do? Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)?
The problem is that the exact times that "intelligent" bill-limiting features are likely to be used are the exact instances in which they could have absolutely disastrous impact if they make a mistake[0]
I haven't experienced this myself, but I've heard Amazon is actually rather lenient when it comes to waiving fees for clear mistakes (accidentally provisioning an expensive instance that you didn't mean to) - their customer support is supposed to be very good, though I have not had to use this myself.
[0] By "mistake", I mean that they are following your instructions correctly, but your instructions happen to be incorrect for handling this situation.
Much expected after the GDrive prices got slashed. Currently I am only using S3 for hosting PDF or other big size files which are downloadable by the public, since the bandwidth is pay-as-go. However for regular storage, Dropbox/GDrive are still the primary choice, due to the fact, the data sync across devices, speaking of sync, what is holding Amazon back from a similar app for S3?