Amazon S3 - The future of all our storage needs?
Since I discovered Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) I’ve been curious about it.
Firstly, it has a very unusual business model; offering unlimited amounts of storage and bandwidth, charging you for what you use.
Their rates are also suprising low:
United States
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 TBRequests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requestsEurope
Storage
$0.18 per GB-Month of storage usedData 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 TBRequests
$0.012 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requestsData transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB), except data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe, which will be charged at regular rates.
So, say for example you are hosting 25,000 Files at 35GB of data,
and you push out 2.2TB of bandwidth per month:
IN TO S3
35 X $0.18 (Storage in Europe) = $6.30
(25,000 / 1,000) X $0.012 (PUT Requests) = $0.30
35 X $0.18 (Transfer in to S3) = $3.50
OUT OF S3
2,252.8GB (2.2TB) X $0.18 (Transfer out, Europe) = $405.50
(25,000 / 10,000) X $0.012 (GET Requests) = $0.03
TOTAL = $415.63!
These low prices make the service extremely affordable… And that’s without compromising reliability or speed of the service.
Amazon S3 uses Amazon’s huge array of servers around the world to host your files across many servers in many different locations. If one server goes down, your file is available from somewhere else. And, if that file becomes extremely popular, other servers can distribute the load. The S3 Network can also dynamically copy very popular files to additional servers to cope with temporary load spikes.
This extremely affordable, reliable, intelligent, fast hosting solution is just fantastic.
I’ll be using Amazon S3 to power the new version of FilePanda, a filesharing service.
If anyone’s interested in using S3 to host files please take a look at my CodeIgniter port of neurofuzzy’s class
To set up the library, open it up in your text editor and enter your key and secret key at the top of the library.
// ----------------------------------------- // ----------------------------------------- // your API key ID var $keyId = ""; // your API Secret Key var $secretKey = ""; // ----------------------------------------- // -----------------------------------------
Here’s an example of how to use the library:
$contents = file_get_contents($path); $this->load->library('s3'); $this->s3->putObject($filename $contents, $bucketName, 'private', $file['type']);
Sign up for S3 and give it a go… it really is an excellent service, and I’d recommend giving it a try.
February 3rd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
And what about transfer in the server where your site is hosted?
You will pay 2 times when you get a file and plus 2 when you download. Or you give directly a link to S3?
February 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
It is a great service to provide, but I don’t think the prices are that low.
March 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Dave, in terms of pricing you’ll be hard pushed to find a reliable, secure host who can provide a GB of bandwidth for $0.18 which is only £0.09 in the UK