Top Marks for S3 Storage and Websites
May 02, 2018
Top Marks for S3 Storage and Websites
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
We use S3 for the storage of all our of static web assets (images, videos, audio, etc), user-uploaded data, internal log files, and backups. In addition to the storage uses, we also use the static website hosting feature for some of our web-based services. This is a particularly cost-effective way of getting a website online - either a small and simple HTML-based site or a complex single-page web application.
- Storage! You can store as much as you like in whatever format and structure you like.
- Pay as you go - you only pay for what you use, so your storage costs scale up and down with your storage and access patterns. No more having to provision space ahead of time or having wasted space floating around. It's also fairly inexpensive.
- Static website hosting - really simple and easy to get going with, but surprisingly powerful. You can do everything from simple static websites to full Single Page Applications (assuming its all Javascript).
- It isn't the cheapest out there for storage, but I think still represents good value for money. You do also have a large array of storage options which can lower the cost if you are willing to reduce reliability/robustness.
- You can't use HTTPS off the bat with S3, so you almost always need to put CloudFront (or similar CDN) in front of it. Whilst this isn't a problem, it means it isn't quite as quick and straightforward to get going with as perhaps some other services.
- Whilst generally very low latency, we have observed occasional latency spikes whilst retrieving objects. Assuming you are running a CDN in front of S3 (which you should) then this becomes less problematic, but it probably isn't the best choice if you absolutely must guarantee low latency.
- S3 is such a great way to store things, it's a little hard to measure all the benefits against the other options (Dropbox, hard drives in laptops etc), but it gives a simple place to store pretty much anything.
- We did replace a traditional LEMP-stack website service with static website hosting in S3 + javascript. This vastly reduced our running costs as we turned all the websites EC2 instances and Load Balancers off. It also meant we didn't have to look after or maintain autoscaling strategies anymore because S3 handles the scaling for us.