Amazon S3 offers a cost effective, redundant storage solution to put your mind at ease!
June 23, 2021

Amazon S3 offers a cost effective, redundant storage solution to put your mind at ease!

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

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

We use Amazon S3 as an additional way to safely backup our server and user data for our entire company and all of our clients. It is a cost effective, redundant service that gives us and our clients piece of mind that their data is secured. It has a storage location in Canada as well which lets us keep our data inside the country which means our user data stays put.
  • Cost effective
  • Easy setup
  • Setup and forget
  • Multiple data centres
  • Free first year!
  • Bills in local currency
  • Can set a budget
  • Global unique bucket names
  • Costs vary per region
  • Costs could balloon
  • Cost effective backup storage for pennies per GB. We have been able to maintain customer backups as part of our base service fees. The costs are usually so low, we can offer an affordable backup to our customers without added cost to them making us more competitive.
  • One small slip of the delete command by one of system administrators wiped out our entire web directory for one of our biggest clients. We had it restored from backup in minutes. Our client didn't even notice that there service had gone down until we sent an email notifying them of our slip up.
  • This was a lesson learned early on in our business, but Amazon S3 made it a small hiccup not a catastrophic event that cost us money.
I have never had an issue with Amazon S3, in ten years I have never had to contact their support team for any issue. Not even billing. I think AWS is the only service that I can speak of that I have never had to contact support at least once. So I honestly cannot provide any specifics about their support.

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

The interface has definitely improved over the years but it was always fairly simple to navigate and setup. We rarely need to access the AWS website and the tools we use to encrypt and send data to Amazon S3 have never had an issue uploading or retrieving data from the S3 bucket. Your bucket names have to be unique throughout the world though, so you can't use a name for a storage bucket that another user has selected.

The standards employed by Amazon S3 have allowed many other software packages to interact with your data bucket, so there are quite a few options available when looking for a backup tool.
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.

Evaluating Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Competitors

Yes - It replaced our cloud providers backup solution after it failed to restore our server after a large data loss that corrupted our OS filesystem. We were able to retrieve our data but it took quite a while to put it back together. The local service did not offer redundant backups either. At the time a fire or other mishap in the data center could potentially take out our cloud server and our data backup.

For a much cheaper price, Amazon was able to offer us backup of our critical data off site using a redundant system.
  • Price
  • Product Reputation

Using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Data backup
  • Data Retrieval
  • Budgeting