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Comment by aninteger | Hacker News Reader

Can you help me understand why someone would host static content on S3 versus any other host? Is it because S3 automatically scales up when traffic increases? I know almost nothing about S3.

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The pricing is competitive, its easy and reliable, and it can handle as much traffic as you like. S3 may not be the best option, but it's definitely a good, no-worries option.

"Competitive" is an interesting word to use. For example, I can get 100Mbit bandwidth from Hetzner for $9/TB. Transferring the same amount of data over S3 would cost me 10x more.

Now, if you're serving large files and you really need more than 100Mbit sustained, S3 makes sense. But it's unquestionably a premium service for a premium price.

I've just created an account just to comment on that. I'm working for different NGOs helping them with their IT projects. Recently one of them asked me to create an equivalent of iTunes store (with the multimedia files available for free to the members). One of their guys was hyper enthusiastic about S3. But no matter how we calculated it, Hetzner was (much) cheaper. Now, the service has been running for over a year on Hetzner services and everybody is very happy. There was one incident (the motherboard on the server died - they replaced it very quickly), that's all. We have all the options we need. Note that the current setup is fairly small: we're serving ca. 4 TB of data to ca. 4000 members.

Now, when people say that S3 scales well, I totally agree. But why do they say that the prices are competitive, that's beyond me. Take Xirra's XS-12 storage (200€/month for 36 TB) and compare it to storing 18 TB (I assume RAID 1) on S3. 1 TB costs $95 on S3! How on Earth can you call it 'competitive'? Now, that's even without bandwidth costs. I totally agree it's a premium service for a premium price. There are plenty of cases when using S3 is just a big waste of money. (And Amazon's decision not to implement cost capping isn't helping either.)

Is that for an S3 like service that you can just upload an unlimited number of static files to? Or do you have to maintain a server too?

Well, if you buy a server or hosting from Hetzner and want a similar setup as S3, you'd have to purchase multiple servers for redundancy. With S3 (and especially CloudFront or other CDNs), you can pay a minimal amount to have all of your files redundantly stored with an extremely high availability (and/or with multiple geographic locations).

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