[rshnotsecure]

What you describe is part of the AWS "Well Architected Framework". Static files should, as much as possible, be hosted on S3. This takes the pressure off the web/app server, is cheaper, increases resiliency to DDOS attacks, and allows much faster loading, particularly of video files, when one integrates the S3 storage with a CDN (such as CloudFront).

What I would find interesting is anyone running a SaaS project and NOT using S3/object storage for a significant amount of their files.

[Beefin]

I think you misunderstand. The non-text files remain in S3, my service just parses them for text, then stores it in a Lucene index to become searchable.