4 ms·

Tangentially, I was just looking at the possibility of hosting a file on Amazon S3, and it's astonishing how expensive it is. They want $0.15/GB for bandwidth.

by TillE 16y ago

Tangentially, I was just looking at the possibility of hosting a file on Amazon S3, and it's astonishing how expensive it is. They want $0.15/GB for bandwidth. In contrast, Linode sells bandwidth for $0.10/GB, and that comes with a whole VPS. So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM and 128GiB of storage (oh, and Linode pools your bandwidth across all nodes). On S3, $160 will buy me a little over 10TB of bandwidth, nevermind storage or anything else. I understand that these cloud services are the most convenient way to scale, and probably the best way to absorb an unexpected spike in usage. But they seem to charge a roughly 50% premium for every resource, as compared to a reliable VPS provider with great customer service, an API that lets you set up temporary servers, etc.

barredo 16y ago
> So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM and 128GiB of storage. In Linode, for $159.95 you get 1.600GB or 1.6TB of bandwidth. Not 16TB.
KrisJordan 16y ago
Linode to S3 is not apples to apples. If you want to compare to S3 you would need multiple linode boxes and a system for redundancy in the face of image corruption or hardware failure. One of the things you are paying for with S3 is a pretty solid guarantee that your files will A) not get lost and B) always be available.
- moe 16y ago
  B) always be available. That's a relative term, though. While complete outages are rare, there are frequent, prolonged periods of abysmal performance (latency in the >300ms range, throughput approaching <50 MBit/s) and the average performance without CloudFront isn't stellar either. However, for many use-cases the sheer convenience and low cost of entry trump these issues.
tlrobinson 16y ago
You can't really compare S3 to a VPS. S3 offers redundancy and scalability that nothing running on a single VPS could do.
- krakensden 16y ago
  Yeah, but how many people take full advantage of that? How many would be better served by a beefy Linode instance running lightthpd?
  - sghael 16y ago
    Redundancy is insurance. By the nature of being there it's taken advantage of

by TillE 16y ago

barredo 16y ago

> So if I pay $160/month, I get 16TB of bandwidth on a VPS with 4GiB of RAM and 128GiB of storage. In Linode, for $159.95 you get 1.600GB or 1.6TB of bandwidth. Not 16TB.

KrisJordan 16y ago

Linode to S3 is not apples to apples. If you want to compare to S3 you would need multiple linode boxes and a system for redundancy in the face of image corruption or hardware failure. One of the things you are paying for with S3 is a pretty solid guarantee that your files will A) not get lost and B) always be available.

moe 16y ago
B) always be available. That's a relative term, though. While complete outages are rare, there are frequent, prolonged periods of abysmal performance (latency in the >300ms range, throughput approaching <50 MBit/s) and the average performance without CloudFront isn't stellar either. However, for many use-cases the sheer convenience and low cost of entry trump these issues.

tlrobinson 16y ago

You can't really compare S3 to a VPS. S3 offers redundancy and scalability that nothing running on a single VPS could do.

krakensden 16y ago
Yeah, but how many people take full advantage of that? How many would be better served by a beefy Linode instance running lightthpd?
- sghael 16y ago
  Redundancy is insurance. By the nature of being there it's taken advantage of