Amazon S3 Costs? And Storage Class ?

Hi
I'm looking into this Amazon S3 option , and would be grateful for any advice .
Are people using the Standard storage, or another of the options ? I'm bemused by the 6 types of variables on pricing - please could anyone give me a rough monthly cost per gb ?

Are you guys hosting your sytist sites on amazon , or on your own servers ?
Thank you !
Carol

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I have 100,000 images on S3 and the costs are less than $3.00 per month. Only charged when clients are downloading images. I am a pro commercial photographer/videographer.
The standard option is all that I use.
My site hosting is with Saratoga.

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We switched to amazon and it was the best thing we did.
We pay about 1.50 US per month for what we have up.
Not sure How many files up there but it's 3 years of large png's.
We have Saratoga Hosting hosting the site with a $12 ( I think ) monthly charge.

We now pay less than 25% of what we paid and have at least 3 times #of the images.

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Hi Carol. I run high volume, my monthly bill and storage is 400GB @ $10.30 Month. Hope this was helpful.

Cheers~

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Thank you for your replies guys ! At the moment I have all our equestrian events back to 2006 available to customers , we find it well worth while compared to the cost of maintaining 12TB on external harddrives (We keep double back-up drives for when one of them fails, which they do from time to time). Thinking of moving to cloud storage for security but the costs seem really high for that amount of photos . I understand why most people remove photos from their websites now. Are people using S3 typically reducing image size for upload to S3/Sytist , or are they high res original images? At present I do an upload set of small digis to Sytist , with other size digis available by email . I find this is the quickest way to do the uploads. This would reduce the archive set to around 1TB ... does anyone have any suggestions as to how long it takes to upload a given amount of data? Of course I'd then still need the external drives for backing up the HR images ..

M Davis thank you for letting me know 100,00 images is less than 3dollars a month , I hope you won't mind if I quiz you further ....Do you have any idea what size these images are please ? (Approx 6mb per image / reduced to 800 pixel /any rough measurement you could give would really help) When you say you only pay when clients download - is there no storage fee on your package ? Which storage option are you using ?

Pridhams thank you for your reply.

Arron thank you , 400GB for 10.30 / month is nice and clear. Another question if I may ? what is running "high volume" ? Does that relate to storage class—S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard - Infrequent Access, S3 One Zone - Infrequent Access, S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive? Or something else?

I really appreciate all your help , trying to work it out from the many variables on Amazon felt impossible

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Hi Carol, we just use S3 standard storage. The purpose is to keep your host cost to a minimum by righting to S3 and not your local hosting company. This saves to $100’s of dollars. High volume means school and sports volume. We upload 1000 of images into s to sytist as well. Hop this was helpful.

Cheers ~

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Thank you all for your replies , much appreciated !

I'll start a new thread about Wasabi which may be of interest ...

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Hi Carol,

I self host on my Synology NAS, which currently has 28TB's mirrored backup (so 14TB useable space). I've still got plenty of space for expansion, store all my RAWs on there too, and never ever have to worry about webspace etc.

You do need a good internet connection, but my hosting fees are $10 a year as I'm only paying for my domain.

It's a big upfront cost, but I would have paid that anyway for a NAS system as I needed a central storage and backup so I can edit from laptop, desktop, remotely and never be limited by any cloud storage limits.

(LizAndrews.com if you want to take a look: I restrict my website to Canada, US and UK so if you are outside that area you'll need a VPN to look).

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Hi Liz ,
Thank you , after going all around the houses I've gone back to self-hosting too - you're right , it's the only way to store large archives at present . The only thing that worries me is the possibility of a power failure taking the website down ... but we can't control everything can we !

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