| I'd agree with that. Let me provide some numbers. Currently, S3 will provide bandwidth out for 300TB/month at ~$21,000. At our web host the same bandwidth would cost $1800. At our CDN, the same bandwidth would cost $3585 to $4791 depending on the number of points of presence you'd require (6 vs 17). S3 and its extreme availability profile is nice, but its not cost effective when the difference between pricing vs the lowest-priced option is almost $20,000 a month. To me, the main alure of S3 was never amazon's architecture or HA, but that you no longer had to manage your storage servers and add capacity in a stepwise process. 7 years ago, to do this you were stuck with GlusterFS or even MongoFS. Today we have OpenStack, Ceph, RiakCS and others providing battle-tested open-source solutions that anyone can run so there's much less of a reason to go S3. I like to compare Amazon to Akamai with the statement of "yes, they're the best or close to it; but do we need the best?" |
It is sad that bandwidth charges out are so expensive because it does make one question their services.