What are the benefits of Having S3?

[Il_Picasso]

Hello!

I am always searching for optimizing my environment, just wondering

 

What are the benefits of using Amazon S3

 

What would be the costs for a concurrent 50 members forum 

 

I have been using filesystem for a while already, if I use S3, what will happen with the files I already got?

[Joel R]

S3 isn't necessary unless you have a significant amount of content that you can't or don't want to save on your server.  Amazon S3 is for storage only.  That's it.  There's no "optimizing your server environment" with S3 (you're probably thinking of caching or CDN).  It's a cheap option to store content and that's it.  

The costs can't be estimated based upon how many concurrent members.  The cost is based upon the total storage that you need to move over to S3 (eg. 50 GB of images in IP.Gallery and 500 GB of files in IP.Downloads).  

If you are currently using the server's filesystem, all that will happen is that the files will be moved over to S3.  Your files will not be saved on both systems.