S3 is the best choice for asset hosting, from client assets through to your entire website frontend.
April 15, 2021

S3 is the best choice for asset hosting, from client assets through to your entire website frontend.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

In my organization, we use S3 for nearly every aspect of asset storage -- user files, user profiles, saved application states -- as well as for hosting our primary web frontends (static React.js applications). It's used by the whole organization, both extensively throughout engineering to host our software and assets, and additionally by our operations and other teams as a general purpose host for special content.

It solves the business problem of exposing any sort of asset to external users, as well as serves as a complete website hosting and deployment service stack for static websites.
  • 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.
  • The whole AWS ecosystem has a lot of confusing and unintuitive configuration options, and S3 is no exception. Thankfully it's so broadly used that you can reliably find solutions on external sites like StackOverflow.
  • Getting IAM permissions just right for Static Website hosting require a little trial and error since S3 defaults to security instead of open access.
  • While S3's file type inference is decent, some new file types (such as .wasm) aren't inferred correctly, so you have to configure their MIME types after uploading them in order for them to serve correctly.
  • Static Website Hosting.
  • Asset hosting with permission granularity ranging from public through session.
  • High stability and performance.
  • Low cost.
  • The time savings of using S3's advanced features versus implementing our own web hosting or asset services is the biggest ROI-- it's a fast-to-use platform that you'll never need to migrate away from because it's so stable and effective.
  • The costs of maintaining local asset hosting (once you factor in maintenance and labor costs) consistently exceeds (and underperforms) what S3 can provide.
  • S3 provides an easy introduction to the AWS ecosystem for companies who are new to its technology. Learning an applying S3 can be done without advanced training or experience, while simultaneously it'll teach you many of the conventions used throughout AWS.
S3 is the most mature simple storage service on the web. It has direct competitors from Google and Azure, as well as a bunch of other competitors that focus on different aspects. For example, Backblaze specializes on file backups, and while s3 can also be used for that, Backblaze provides a better price point in exchange for more focused functionality. S3 really shines in that it performs simple things astonishingly well, while also being flexible enough to stretch itself to other situations (data lakes, file mounts, backup/restores systems, web hosting, etc.).

Do you think Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) again?

Yes

I've used S3 continuously for projects large and small for over 10 years. It's just such a common and essential tool in software development. Hosting assets/images, or providing file upload abilities to users, come up very often throughout software, and S3 is hands-down the best place to serve and store files. It's flexible enough that you can use client libraries to perform direct uploads rather than writing your own handlers, etc. S3 is a tool that immediately has value for file hosting and storage, and then extends as far as you need it to for all manner of asset management.