Transitioning To Amazon S3, Who To Host With?

We have HostGator which has been working great, but for the third time in a row, the pricing has taken a jump. And this one comes out to a ludicrous jump to $800 for three years. While I am a full time photographer I work with a lot of clients where delivery just doesn't need to touch the website. So I make a full gallery six or seven times a year.

Is Amazon S3 only for the storage? Am I reading that I'll still need a web host to run the Sytist software? Who do ya'll recommend? It looks like I can downgrade to the HostGator 'Hatchling Plan' if I put my data on S3 (10gb right now, needs cleaning). Which would be at a not so great $11 a month. Is there cheaper and just as reliable?

Thank you for your insights, I do appreciate them. I'm sitting on the fence between keeping my website or not.

We switched to Saratoga hosting a few years back and have been completely happy.

For quite a while we just took the minimum package option 10/12 Canadian a month I think?

About 18months ago I upped our package to the next level, I didn't have to but it gave a bit more flexibility when uploading 2,000 png's.

For a very reasonable fee Dave took care of almost everything for me.

Amazon S3 is just for photo file storage. 

• Saratoga Hosting
• KnownHost

Thanks Pridham and Tim!

Has anyone tried Namecheap's hosting? I was poking around last night and found they had really reasonable prices and seem to be accommodating for the needed PHP version.

Saratoga looks good, but if I can swing something with under 10gb of storage, that's more than enough for me. With Saratoga it looks like I'm going to need S3 for sure.