"The photos themselves go straight to Amazon S3, which currently stores several terabytes of photo data for us." http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/1

"The photos themselves go straight to Amazon S3, which currently stores several terabytes of photo data for us." http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/wha... That was 7 months ago, so let's say 5TB today. Plugging that into the calculator for AWS says Instagram pays a whopping $500 for photo storage each month. I don't want to take the time to do it myself but here http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram-architecture-facebook-bought-for-a-cool-billio.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram-archi... someone punches (in the comments) all of their numbers into the AWS calculator. He comes up with 12k per month based on what they've said they're running.