Amazon S3 Vs unlimited web hosting - looking for the opinion of people with experience

by ruch1v
3 replies
Hey guys

I'm interested in hearing from folks who have some experience with this.

Is it better to use amazon s3 or get a hosting account with a company that provide unlimited bandwidth (in this case $7/month with bluehost)

I guess it's pretty difficult to anticipate and compare the pricing with s3 when it's structured like '$0.140 per GB' - I have absolutely no idea how many gb I will use or how many views would constitute a gb.


Can anyone shed any light on this? Or possibly advise me on real life examples of costs for using s3?

Thanks

Ruchi
#amazon #experience #hosting #opinion #people #unlimited #web
  • Profile picture of the author WillR
    One of the main advantages of using S3 is all the extra load it takes off your server. Every server, whether shared or dedicated, has a breaking point. The more people on your site and the more requests those people are sending to your server (ie an image or a CSS style sheet is just 1 request ), the closer you become to that breaking point.

    By hosting files such as images and CSS styles sheets on a 3rd party service such as S3, it increases the capacity of your server and speeds things up for each user. Also if you use a lot of video then S3 is going to allow a lot more people to simultaneously watch those videos without greatly affecting the performance of your server.

    Another advantage of S3 is the CDN (Content Delivery Network) which stores your files on various servers all around the world so each users receives the files from the location closest to them - this also speeds up things for your customers.
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  • Profile picture of the author ruch1v
    Thanks for the tips Will, I worked out that I need to use upto 50gb/month worth of bandwidth for s3 to be cheaper, I've got no idea how much I'm going to use yet, but 50gb does sound like an awful lot. I guess that's the better choice
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  • Profile picture of the author Kay Zee
    The biggest problem with shared hosting is concurrent connections.

    Look up warrior "josh anderson" and go through some of his posts and it explains everything you need to know.
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