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Just wondering if there is good alternative to Amazon's S3 service? I like S3 but the bandwidth cost is high. I looked at CouldFiles from Rackspace but the cost is even higher.

I don't mind prepaying or having monthly payment in order to reduce the bandwidth cost greatly.

Thank you for any help

EDIT: Sometimes there are frequent downloads which causes the bandwidth cost to go up very quickly, but mostly it is about 25T/month. The storage is about 1T.

Jens Erat
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Cory
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6 Answers6

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Can you give us a rough idea of your bandwidth / storage requirements? Generally the cheapest cost is to purchase your own server and then colocate it at an inexpensive datacenter. But that is more work to manage it plus more cost up-front to buy the servers.

Edit: Ok, that's about $3000-$4000/mo in Amazon S3 costs.

25TB/mo could probably be handled with a single dedicated 100mbit/sec line. and 1TB of storage is nothing. You could get a pair of 1.5TB drives in a mirror (for redundancy) and have a little room to grow. A rough estimate would be $2000 up front to buy the server, then $200-400/mo to colocate the server (the monthly cost includes physical space for your server, power, and bandwidth). Shop around for some datacenters that offer server colocation to see if you can find any deals.

davr
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Without knowing what it is you're trying to serve (sold media? can it be compressed?) I'll offer up a few different suggestions.

  • You could use Coral and a mod_rewrite - It's free and would offload a lot of the bandwidth.
  • Or another commercial CDN such as CacheFly (they work with small businesses almost exclusively), Akamai, or Limelight Networks
  • There's always bittorrent
  • Other P2P CDNs such as Pando
Tyler
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I agree with davr. The cheapest alternative is to get your own dedicated server.

Take a look at this for instance:

http://www.server4you.net/root-server/server-details.php?products=5

Hosting in Germany is relatively cheap (compared to US prices). This is a dedicated Server with 2x 1TB HDD, QuadCore CPU and 8GB Ram. Traffic is 100Mbit/s flat. All in all 99 EUR per Month (135 USD).

Most German Datacenters got direct peerings at DECIX, AMS-IX and/or LINX (which by size are the three largest Internet Exchange Points worldwide). So if your service doesn't mind 150-300ms latency you usually get the full 100 Mbit/s throughput even on the Westcoast.

So, maybe get a couple of these and you should be fine.

Though it should be mentioned that this can not replace a proper CDN. But since you're asking for an alternative to S3, not CloudFront I guess this is understood.

Another alternative would be this offer

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix/

Although traffic is flat too, they shape you from 100 Mbit/s down to 10 Mbit/s if you transfer more than 2TB/Month or alternatively charge 15 EUR for each TB over 2TB. So all in all you'd be around 99 EUR for the Server plus 345 EUR for the 23TB additional traffic.

Lukas Loesche
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It really depends what you want to achieve, the only other "big player" in the mesh/cloud that I can think of is Windows Azure from Microsoft.

However, if you just want a place to dump files and let people read/download, why not just use a standard package from any web host? There are many out there with great bandwidth and features for budget prices.

William Hilsum
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For simple sharing I really like Dropbox. They have a reasonable free option and the paid options are for fixed amount of space, no bandwidth charges. I'm not sure they have a restful API like S3 does, so app integration isn't great. But for straight up sharing it works well.

Ian C.
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Connectria Cloud Storage, more reliable, secure and affordable than S3...and S3 compatible for those interested in migrating from S3

https://www.mh.connectria.com/rp/order/cloud_storage_index

Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Connectria.

slhck
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Scott
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