With AWS i don't have to buy, set up, maintain or upgrade the
hardware... or manage employees who do. Nor do i own the hardware. Nor do i have to travel to and from a datacenter.
This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though.
I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites.
I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per month, and the number hits I get, I still pay less for my business class shared hosting plan than I would pay for S3.
And I also have full shell access and scriptability.
To top it off my plan actually covers 1TB traffic a month, so my site could scale up to 12 times traffic-wise before I would need to upgrade my account. At that cross-over point Amazon S3 would still be 54% more expensive than my current solution.
This might not apply to everyone, but in my case getting S3 would be plain dumb.
I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites.
I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per month, and the number hits I get, I still pay less for my business class shared hosting plan than I would pay for S3.
And I also have full shell access and scriptability.
To top it off my plan actually covers 1TB traffic a month, so my site could scale up to 12 times traffic-wise before I would need to upgrade my account. At that cross-over point Amazon S3 would still be 54% more expensive than my current solution.
This might not apply to everyone, but in my case getting S3 would be plain dumb.