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Comment by ropiku | Hacker News Reader

Using Amazon S3 you have the advantage of using a tested and scalable system, easy to implement and use and it's not expensive.

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Amazon S3 is actually relatively expensive. It's far cheaper in the long run to host it on your own server. However, if you don't have experience setting up scalable systems, tuning your configuration, or do not want to spend time doing that type of sysadmin stuff, it can be a good way to save time. It's like buying Coke at a vending machine instead of at a wholesale store. You're paying for the convenience more than anything else. Just be aware of how much you're being marked up.

Yep. Someone needs to build a S3-like solution and open source it, down to the cluster setup and harddrive specs and brand names. I have set up a storage cluster once with mogilefs and perlbal but finding documentation was a nightmare. There is none, you have to dig through the mailing-list archives.

But then again, that is the kind of stuff that people get paid ridiculous amounts of money to build, heck, I know I did. So I wouldn't bet on it. But if I had the time I would probably do it.

Maybe my math is off or something. But according to the S3 calc: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

If a 150MB is downloaded 100 times it would cost $2.59. If it was downloaded 1000 times it would cost $25.55. Is that cheap?

Compared to the cost of building and maintaining your own system I think it is cheaper. Add the cost of servers, colocation, bandwidth, people.

Also, on S3 you pay exactly for what you use, if you use your own server you are paying for them up front. Another bonus is the using their CDN if you have frequently downloaded files.

Check this comment by Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug which stores a huge amount of data on S3: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422574. Check his blog too: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/tag/s3.

Not cheap but reasonable. They pushed 1.5T of traffic for you at that point.

If you're going on a base10 system then it's only 150GB, not 1.5TB. Technically it's 146.5GB.

Argh, you are right, off by a magnitude.

Well, I'll try to make up for it by pointing the original asker to http://simplecdn.com

From their frontpage:

A software developer with 100MB worth of downloads would pay $24.90 for lifetime storage, and would then receive a transfer rate of 3.9 cents per GB.

So, pay $24.90 once and serve your 1000 downloads for $5.80 then.

Cloudfront!

Like hell S3 isn't expensive.

You contribute nothing to the conversation.

This has already been discussed in some detail at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225. I suggest anyone interested in talking price/value reads up on that thread before commenting here.

I run a fairly small site. We're upto around 7 million hits a month, still pretty tiny. Our costs right now are fairly low, but recently I made a post inquiring how to cluster efficiently, because we needed more bandwidth available (And we were going to use a few 10mbit servers).

Someone suggested that we use s3. This would've tripled our bandwidth costs.

This is why I believe it's expensive.

And how would your s3 bandwidth costs compare to running your clustered servers? Is the DIY storage triply redundant?

I'm not saying you made the wrong decision, or the right one, but is the comparison apples-to-apples?

Also, that discussion there seemed focus solely on the point of STORAGE.

He seemed to be concerned about bandwidth also, for which S3, frankly, is not cheap.

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