Amazon Simple Storage Service
The story is simple, and probably much more common than I would have thought. You need more disk space on your web hosting account, let's say because you have a ton of product guides, images and supplements for your products that you make available for download. At first it was not really an issue, but as your site has grown you have quickly used up the disk space, or storage space, on your hosting account.
One option is to upgrade your hosting account each time you use up the disk space, which to me is a bit of a short-sighted solution that does not address the larger problem- you use a disproportionate amount of disk space. You're not using a lot of memory, and you are not pushing your bandwidth limits on your hosting account. You just need more storage.
Introducing Amazon Simple Storage Service
Enter Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which can best be described just the way that they describe it. It is storage for the Internet, which translates to disk space. Amazon provides this web service as a way for people to store large amounts of data (up to 5 gigabytes per object) in a way that removes it from your web hosting account. In other words, you can store unlimited amounts of data independently, and access it from anywhere on the Internet (provided that you have permission to do so).
From the development side, the S3 web service has a very simple API that allows you to add/edit/delete data objects. They provide authentication methods so that you can protect your data, and make sure that only the users that are allowed to access a data object can access it. Put it all together, and you've got a remote hard drive with unlimited disk space. And you'll never need to move it, even if you switch hosting companies or start to scale up.
So what is the cost? It's actually pretty affordable, as disk space is cheap. However, I've seen easier-to-understand pricing schedules, so here is the simple breakdown:
- You pay for storage space. $0.15 per gigabyte of storage that you use, per month.
- You pay to transfer data in (upload files to the S3 service). This costs $0.10 for each gigabyte that you upload.
- You pay to transfer data out (download files from the S3 service). This costs $0.17 per gigabyte for the first 10 terrabytes, with price breaks at each 30 terrabyte mark after that.
In other words, just like a hosting account, you are paying for the actual disk space that you use, as well as for the bandwidth resources that you consume while moving data in and out. The only difference is that it is much cheaper than a hosting account. Additionally, you will never adversely affect your website by accidentally using up all the disk space on your web server.
Also, just since I am writing about the service, is that there is a plugin for Ruby on Rails called attachment_fu that integrates seamlessly with the S3 service for storing uploaded files. I'm sure that there are a ton of other plugins, extensions, and libraries out there that can help as well.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: amazon, storage, amazon s3, ruby, rails.
