Good question. It is a site where people can upload 1 special 150MB file (like a zip file) and people can download the entire thing. So the average file size will not be a few megs.
You need to bound the problem before you can figure out whether S3 makes sense.
* How many new files do you expect to have uploaded every month?
* How many files do you expect to be deleted every month?
* What's the average file size?
* How many times, on average, do you expect each file to be downloaded per-month?
Use that + Amazon's pricing to figure out how much you'll have to spend on S3 every month. Then compare that to your alternatives.
In my mind, the biggest reason to go with S3 is if you think you are going to end up with a lot more files than you could easily store and mirror on a few leased servers. S3 is a pretty good price for scalable, highly-available storage with a nice fat pipe to the Internet, but the cost per GB transferred isn't great. You can take advantage of the lost cost of storage by keeping track of how often files are downloaded and keeping a cache of locally hosted files that you serve directly off a leased server or VPS.
You need to bound the problem before you can figure out whether S3 makes sense.
* How many new files do you expect to have uploaded every month?
* How many files do you expect to be deleted every month?
* What's the average file size?
* How many times, on average, do you expect each file to be downloaded per-month?
Use that + Amazon's pricing to figure out how much you'll have to spend on S3 every month. Then compare that to your alternatives.
In my mind, the biggest reason to go with S3 is if you think you are going to end up with a lot more files than you could easily store and mirror on a few leased servers. S3 is a pretty good price for scalable, highly-available storage with a nice fat pipe to the Internet, but the cost per GB transferred isn't great. You can take advantage of the lost cost of storage by keeping track of how often files are downloaded and keeping a cache of locally hosted files that you serve directly off a leased server or VPS.
You need to bound the problem before you can figure out whether S3 makes sense.
* How many new files do you expect to have uploaded every month?
* How many files do you expect to be deleted every month?
* What's the average file size?
* How many times, on average, do you expect each file to be downloaded per-month?
Use that + Amazon's pricing to figure out how much you'll have to spend on S3 every month. Then compare that to your alternatives.
In my mind, the biggest reason to go with S3 is if you think you are going to end up with a lot more files than you could easily store and mirror on a few leased servers. S3 is a pretty good price for scalable, highly-available storage with a nice fat pipe to the Internet, but the cost per GB transferred isn't great. You can take advantage of the lost cost of storage by keeping track of how often files are downloaded and keeping a cache of locally hosted files that you serve directly off a leased server or VPS.
