Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. MEGA

Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.

Incentivized

MEGA is great for storing and syncing files across devices. It has a great web interface, as well as a sync tool for desktop and a mobile app that works very well on iPhone. (I have not used the Android version of the app.) I like the overall usability, as well as some of the features like the QR code and contact list functionality. I like the file versioning and file management features as well. What works less well for me is collaboration with other users, and file sharing among users. I have not been able to find a way to view all files shared with me from other users in the same view as my own files. In fact, when files are shared with me, the only way I have been able to locate them is through Notifications, which is sub-par. I would much prefer to see all shared folders alongside my files, without having to make a copy of the shared folder, thus losing the ability to sync with another user's changes, as well as using up my storage space.

Incentivized

• Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
• Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
• It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
• Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.

Incentivized

• Mega is very easy to use
• Mega has a solid referral program unlike others
• Mega is very secure

Incentivized

• Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
• Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are

Incentivized

• Sometimes the download rate drops by a lot, so the downloads take much longer.

Due to princing, availability and scalability.

Incentivized

It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.

Incentivized

Clean, contemporary UI that is heavily polished and works great. You can tell they did a lot of user testing with this, and have a top notch UI design team that really cares about the customer. A highly user-friendly service across platforms and form factors, I found their web, desktop and mobile apps to all be impeccably designed and consistent.

Incentivized

AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.

Incentivized

While I have never contacted customer support, there is a large user community that has posted solutions on third party websites to a number of common questions like how to share files, and how to access files that have been shared with you. When I received a 40 GB shared file, I was not able to find how to access it until I searched on Google to find a solution, which was easy to find. The large user community helps with support tremendously.

Incentivized

Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.

Incentivized

The two apps Google Drive and MEGA provided free cloud storage but Google Drive grants just 15 GB not more as free to try, At that time MEGA granted us 50 GB at the beginning of use, which gave us a chance to use it with high capacity.

Incentivized

• It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
• The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
• If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.

Incentivized

• Positive ROI
• Easy to implement
• Substantial additional free storage with referral program

Incentivized