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This is correct. The biggest cost I saw was bandwidth, followed by cycles on their machines. MediaCrush was a "media hosting website" (see original comment) and as such, used a lot of bandwidth and did a lot of work transcoding things, and had a large storage requirement.

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Were you comparing bandwidth/data transfer in your numbers for EC2, S3 or CloudFront?

I don't know, it was an anecdotal story from a while ago. Before we left AWS we were utilizing all three (iirc these numbers didn't factor in CloudFront though). Point I'm making is - do the research and don't just reach immediately for AWS.

Oh okay I was just curious. I completely agree. The AWS bill at my startup went up quite a bit after the free trial ended since there are many variables that are included with each service such as how many requests/mo, tiered bandwidth, etc. The AWS calculator is nice and so is the billing estimator, but it's still quite confusing.

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