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Thread: Amazon S3 for a file host?
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02-03-2008, 11:36 AM #1Web Hosting Guru
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Amazon S3 for a file host?
Hello,
I have been reading about Amazon S3's service at http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261 and I was wondering if it would be wise to use their service for a file host (like rapidshare..) I may be starting?
How good is their bandwidth and what is their policy on copyrighted material?
Or should I buy my own servers from an unmetered provider, such as alphared?
Thanks
* sorry if this is the wrong forum to post in
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02-03-2008, 11:55 AM #2Custom Hosting Master
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You'll probably be facing the same policies on copyrighted materials, which may result in your account getting suspended if you are hosting any illegal content. If you can actively monitor your file uploads you should be fine. Can't really comment on S3 speed, I think it's ok but the speed isn't so consistent.
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02-03-2008, 01:01 PM #3Web Hosting Master
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you will go out of business in no time with the prices amazon are charging
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02-03-2008, 02:43 PM #4Web Hosting Master
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02-03-2008, 03:50 PM #5Newbie
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02-03-2008, 04:50 PM #6Junior Guru
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Say you transfer 50 TB a month. With a popular filehost, that's peanuts I think. The really big players (Megaupload, Rapidshare) probably count monthly transfer in perabytes, but anyway.
50000 GB * $0.13/GB = $6500
For $6500 you could get say, about five 100Mbit dedicated unmetered servers which could transfer about 150 TB combined. And I haven't even included the cost of storage in the Amazon S3 price yet.
Of course Amazon S3 is probably a lot more reliable (no worries about redundancy and backups), but IMHO with a file hosting service that isn't a major concern..
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02-03-2008, 05:32 PM #7Web Hosting Master
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Can you quantify that statement with a rational argument?
ok i will then quantify with a very rational argument
it would cost me over 50,000$/month to run my site
( http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/mihd.net )
if we used Amazon S3
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02-03-2008, 06:34 PM #8Web Hosting Guru
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S3 is pretty good price wise for storage but their bandwidth fees are terrible.
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02-03-2008, 07:06 PM #9Web Hosting Master
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Months ago I did some tests using Amazon S3. I began the tests expecting to replace some of my servers with a fast and reliable service and finished the tests frustrated. Latency was very bad, donwload speeds not that good, and uploads faulty. Searching the Internet I found other users complaining about the same issues and this old story:
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/...246658,00.html
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02-04-2008, 03:46 AM #10Internet:Just Piracy No Scurvy
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Cheapest Multiple C Class IP Hosting
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02-28-2008, 01:59 PM #11Web Hosting Master
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The rationale most companies are using for replacing their hardware and bandwidth solutions by using Amazon S3 basically comes down to not having to invest in hundreds of commodity servers, high-end storage (most companies using S3 were using SANS or Apple X-Raid's), labor, networking, software development to manage seamless scaling of storage, but not so much the bandwidth.
For the image or filehosting sites where a basic approach has been taken with PHP scripting and with cheap rackmounts setup without any redundancy and just local drives you're not going to see a cost advantage.
One idea I have been toying with is using Amazon S3 or one of the similar service is offloading low traffic media to it to maximize the use of existing equipment and storage.
But as a filehost application the major issue I see with using the S3 for storage, if you're pointing directly to the media via your website using a redirected CNAME record, you're losing control of blocking abuse/hotlinking, and with those files being on a metered service it could quickly cost you a lot of $$$ should they get linked on other high traffic sites.
From what I've heard transfers were pretty slow, like 20-50kb/s.Last edited by sshepherd; 02-28-2008 at 02:02 PM.