Community Members,

I am the lead designer of a new social media website that will be launching in the coming future. However, I have a question I would like assistance in answering.

To start the initial expected web volume is several hundred visitors a day with exponentially growth over the next several months as marketing and word-of-mouth fully commences. Estimates are predicting 1000+ hits to start and with growth moving into a 100,000+ hits per day.

Now that you have the information of our expected website traffic I need information on media storage recommendations. The currently designed system is engineered for local storage of all uploaded content (videos, images, etc.) However, I am investigating whether it would be less expensive to host all media content through Amazon S3. As Amazon S3 storage is approximately 10 cents per GB while local storage is costing us about 30 cents per GB. My first concern is will Amazon S3 be able to load the media content with respectable performance...as I have no interest in slow page loads? Secondly I am concerned that with Amazon S3 the bandwidth costs and more importantly the "File Requests" will out-weight the benefits of using Amazon.

One large Pro for Amazon S3 is that it would offload storage and bandwidth concerns to a third party. Primarily though I am looking for the least expensive solution.

My question is what do the community members of Web Hosting Talk recommend? Local storage or S3?

Thank you,
Myflag