Benefits of Amazon S3?

I've looked at Amazon's S3 and I'm planning on moving stuff over to it, but I'm wondering what stuff should be moved and what shouldn't. Is it that much of a benefit to move all of my images there so that those requests don't come through my web server? In the grand scheme of things will that make much difference?

Solution 1:

First, you need to ask yourself what problem are you trying to solve. Only when that has been answered can you truly determine if it is worth it for you to move all or part of your site to S3. If you can't figure out if you have a problem that needs to be solved, chances are good that it's very much not worth your time to move things to S3.

S3 provides several benefits. A few of the main ones are:

• data redundancy
• high availability
• high scalability
• reduced hosting costs (possibly - depending on your host)
• high bandwidth
• ease of getting your data into a CDN (CloudFront)

Solution 2:

I help run photoblog.com and we switched to s3+cloudfront due to

• no need to worry about backups
• no need to worry about adding new image server

Also in the end we are saving around $200 a month from what we'd pay with 3 servers.. now using 1.5TBs of images on s3