Amazon S3 file storage (or other service)

[MSUKForum]

We are moving servers soon and it only has a small SSD, we need to externally store our files/images externally and wondered who you recommend?

I heard Amazon S3 is the go to, how do people find this and what are the typical costs?

Thanks in advance.

[Joel R]

Amazon S3 is supported as an integration providers.  There's a help guide that you can read.  

Amazon Web Services provides a calculator.  

[The Old Man]

@jpointer2_merged

I use Amazon S3 and would recommend it. There are also cheaper 'clones' such as Wasabi available.

Re costs, it's surprisingly low cost. To give you an idea, my largest site has an S3 bucket with currently 3.7GB of assets (attachments, themes, images etc) and I'm now out of the free tier for the 1st year which includes lots of free allowances. Obviously mileage will vary as it's all relative to your site, but my cost during the free year was about $1_2 a month and now is less than $4-$5 a month including Cloudfront CDN and some other features, which reduces your costs further than using S3 alone and let's you mask the rather gruesome default provided url  sjhbbhjsbhjbhjs1223748@amazonaws.com with a nice CNAME such as cdn.yoursitename.com etc. Also using Cloudflare will help because it prevents a lot of undesirable bad bots from accessing your files, thereby saving you some bandwidth and access costs.

Its the 20th of the month and here are my current costs, also you can set a budget and get alerts way before any overspending.

The IPS Help Guide for AWS S3 sadly hasn't been updated for a long time especially in terms of the video tutorial, but it's enough to get you going and combined with the AWS documentation (which is comprehensive but still contains some contradictory information such as having to make the objects/files in your bucket publicly readable (you shouldn't for just storing images, css, js etc)), you should have no real problems.

There is a lot of trial and error but one tip I'd recommend to anyone setting up S3 is when naming your S3 bucket to store your assets, you will see some docs saying to use your domain name in DNS compatible format. This originally was interpreted as say cdn.yoursitename.com so that is what you would name the bucket. Last year AWS added some new features and it became clear that you are better off naming your bucket cdn-yoursitename-com using hyphens instead of dots for a few reasons, the main one being compatibility with the newer S3 features such as s3 acceleration or cross region bucket replication. You can't enable it if your bucket name contains dots, even though technically that is dns compatible. You can't rename a bucket, so I had to create a new bucket with hyphens, copy over all my files and permissions, etc, then switch my Cloudfront and IPS4 to use the new bucket.

Hope you find this helpful.

[Saurabh Jain]

I have around 32 GB on one of the website ... and it looks good to me - though I have not penetrated for cost reduction...

It looks a good option to me 

[The Old Man]

Here's a link to their cost estimator. It may not include any relevant taxes.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?p=ps

Go for the S3 Standard Storage to begin with, that's the basic storage solution. You also probably need an idea of your average monthly requests and bandwidth traffic in and out, your server stats, logs or Google Analytics could give you some idea.

[The Old Man]

Great article by astrapi here!