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I understand that Amazon's S3 CDN is pay for what you use. If anyone here has had a traffic spike using Amazon's CDN, what amount did you owe Mr. Bezos? I wou

I understand that Amazon's S3 CDN is pay for what you use. If anyone here has had a traffic spike using Amazon's CDN, what amount did you owe Mr. Bezos? I would hate to have to tell my wife that we are buying groceries with the credit card for a while because my little website was on slashdot.

sp332 15y ago
You can use the APIs to spin up more instances when traffic goes up (and then close them down when you're not using them), but that doesn't happen automatically. Other than that, bandwidth costs are very high at Amazon compared most places, but it's still only $120/TB. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
- pjscott 15y ago
  The question was about S3, which can be used to host static content. S3 has the same data transfer prices as EC2, but you pay for storage and requests instead of keeping instances running. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - utefan001 15y ago
    Is this math correct? 400k of images, 1 million requests 400 * 1 million / 1024 / 1024 = 381.5 GB 381.5 * .14 = $53.41
biot 15y ago
Use CloudFlare[0] with your site. They cache your static content for free and estimate a 60% bandwidth savings as a result. Apparently you can continue to S3 host your content and they'll cache that too. Disclaimer: I haven't used them, but I've heard good things about the service.[1] [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631019 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631019 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561341 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561341
rkalla 15y ago
Technically S3 is not Amazon's CDN (CloudFront is) it just behaves like one and a lot of people use it like one. For a localized readership, it is fine since all the data will be coming out of a single regional location. If you have global readership and need locality, that is where CloudFront comes in handy with 20 POPs around the globe that data is distributed to. Serving off of S3 is not that expensive, even if your site goes gangbusters. Serving off of CloudFront can surprise you because of the sometimes unexpected number of origin pulls that can occur as your data is expired from the edge locations. You are sharing cache space on each edge node with every other CloudFront user, if your content is red hot it stays in the cache, but if it is low-volume (which is a relative term to the other traffic coming out of the node) it gets expired much faster, sometimes hours so any future hits for it will pull (download) it again from S3 to CloudFront, then back out from CloudFront to the client. The performance implications aren't horrific (they can be for video) but the cost can double what you are paying with enough origin pulls occuring requiring redownload over and over and over again for the same files from the edge locations. I have seen this catch a handful of people offguard to the tune of $100s of dollars or thousands on the forums over the last few years because they didn't realize this could happen... they just looked at the bandwidth rates on the site, multiplied by their payload sizes and thought that was the fixed rate.

sp332 15y ago

You can use the APIs to spin up more instances when traffic goes up (and then close them down when you're not using them), but that doesn't happen automatically. Other than that, bandwidth costs are very high at Amazon compared most places, but it's still only $120/TB. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

pjscott 15y ago
The question was about S3, which can be used to host static content. S3 has the same data transfer prices as EC2, but you pay for storage and requests instead of keeping instances running. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- utefan001 15y ago
  Is this math correct? 400k of images, 1 million requests 400 * 1 million / 1024 / 1024 = 381.5 GB 381.5 * .14 = $53.41

biot 15y ago

Use CloudFlare[0] with your site. They cache your static content for free and estimate a 60% bandwidth savings as a result. Apparently you can continue to S3 host your content and they'll cache that too. Disclaimer: I haven't used them, but I've heard good things about the service.[1] [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/ https://www.cloudflare.com/ [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631019 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631019 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561341 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2561341

rkalla 15y ago

Technically S3 is not Amazon's CDN (CloudFront is) it just behaves like one and a lot of people use it like one. For a localized readership, it is fine since all the data will be coming out of a single regional location. If you have global readership and need locality, that is where CloudFront comes in handy with 20 POPs around the globe that data is distributed to. Serving off of S3 is not that expensive, even if your site goes gangbusters. Serving off of CloudFront can surprise you because of the sometimes unexpected number of origin pulls that can occur as your data is expired from the edge locations. You are sharing cache space on each edge node with every other CloudFront user, if your content is red hot it stays in the cache, but if it is low-volume (which is a relative term to the other traffic coming out of the node) it gets expired much faster, sometimes hours so any future hits for it will pull (download) it again from S3 to CloudFront, then back out from CloudFront to the client. The performance implications aren't horrific (they can be for video) but the cost can double what you are paying with enough origin pulls occuring requiring redownload over and over and over again for the same files from the edge locations. I have seen this catch a handful of people offguard to the tune of $100s of dollars or thousands on the forums over the last few years because they didn't realize this could happen... they just looked at the bandwidth rates on the site, multiplied by their payload sizes and thought that was the fixed rate.