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[ElSolo]

also not upload photos!!!I whith Urkaine

[seraph0x]

The US server went down again today and it's still down, but I've now switched the US region over to Amazon S3. That means everything should be working again while we attempt to fix the server.

(In case you're wondering why we don't always use S3 - it's several times more expensive than our normal server, but for a day or two it's no problem.)

The EU issue is a separate issue - the server is up, but for some reason the image reverse proxy isn't working, should be a very quick fix, but I've also switched EU over to S3 for now.

[seraph0x]

Ok, everything is back to normal.

[pjh776]

(In case you're wondering why we don't always use S3 - it's several times more expensive than our normal server, but for a day or two it's no problem.)

Hey Seraph0x, being a heavy user of AWS, I'm really intrigued by this statement. Are you quite sure about it? In a big site I have, I had an EC2+EBS solution to serve static content (tons and tons of images, thumbnails, etc) that I've recently turned off and moved to S3 to serve all that content: the result were reduced costs!

According to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ and http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/, S3 storage is $0.095/GB-month, while EBS is $0.10/GB-month. Also, S3 you pay for what you use, while in EC2 you pay for what you provision. There's also the implicit maintenance and back up cost on EC2+EBS (you have to monitor disk usage and make them bigger by yourself on an EC2+EBS solution, plus you have to pay for storing your backups). The data transfer cost is exactly the same.

For S3, there's only one more cost:
- S3 cost per GET, $0.01 per 10k (let's forget about POSTs, since I suppose you have way image uploads than downloads).

For EC2+EBS, there's still:
- EC2 instance cost per hour, which depends on what you need;
- Eventually more than one EC2 instance, if you want redundancy (and make it more comparable to what S3 would give you)
- Eventually an ELB, if you have more than 1 EC2 instance
- EBS costs for IO ops ($0.10 per 1M)

It is not easy to compare S3 costs with GET operations with EBS costs for IO ops, but they wouldn't be *that* significant anyways.

From this overview, it looks like EBS+EC2 would be way more expensive than S3 for serving static content for a solution that would be at most as reliable and require much more maintenance (the only benefit of EC2+EBS is, maybe, lower latency, but I wouldn't give too much weight to this benefit in serving static images).

I'm very intrigued: how did you come to your conclusion that S3 is several times more expensive?

PJH

[seraph0x]

We don't use EC2 at all, except for the XMPP (chat) server.

The storage space, requests, etc. are negligible in our case, 90% of our costs are for bandwidth. Amazon charges an absurd 0.12$ per GB outbound, so instead of Amazon we use a dedicated server at a small hosting firm with 2 TB bandwidth included, which works out to about 0.03$ per GB - all inclusive.

Once the US image server hits the 2 TB limit, we'll need two of these servers, but at its worst, when we use just over 2 TB, it will still work out to less than 0.05$ per GB and again with Amazon you pay the 0.12$/GB plus a bunch of other fees for storage and requests etc.

That said, our traffic goes up all the time, so we have to constantly change and fix things. And dedicated servers are never as reliable as S3 would be. So this setup is pretty specifically optimized for Milovana - we don't care about uptime too much and I don't bill Milovana for my hours, so it's really just a matter of getting the lowest possible rate per GB. (Btw. if someone has ideas for going lower than 0.03$/GB effective - I'm all ears.)

[pjh776]

Oh, I see! That's why S3 would be very expensive for Milovana.

In my case, I really need lots of things S3 (and many, many more AWS services, including EC2, SQS, SNS, SES, RDS, Route 53, DynamoDB), so, well, we pay for it :P

I will let you know if I get to know a any service with a better rate than $0.03/GB!

[pjh776]

Hey, seraph0x, today I came across a hosting solution and remembered this thread. It might interest you: https://www.enzu.com/cloud-server-pricing.php

Their smallest server is one with 1GB ram, 60GB storage, 1 core 2GHz, bandwidth included 3000GB/mo, for $50/mo.

Cheers