Speed Up That Cheap Website with Cheap Amazon S3


Do you have an economy-grade website host? Me too. BlueHost is great for only $6.95 per month but its response times and transfer rates are terrible. Fear not — Amazon S3 to the rescue. For pennies a day you can supplement your cheap website host using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is simple. So simple.

  • Sign up for an account.
  • Download and install the awesome S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) Firefox add-on.
  • Upload the files you want to be served up like hotcakes.
  • Update the links in your HTML files to point to the new location.
    Example: http://s3.amazonaws.com/jeremy/blog/images/large_bandwidth_sucking_header.jpg
    Note that the example is intended to show the format of the URL and does not point to a valid resource.

Too good to be true? Nope. The S3 files are served up lickety split and best of all it takes the load off of your cheap host which allows it to function much more efficiently. So far I have moved my site’s header and the LightBox JS file. Why didn’t I move the other JS files and images? Because Google hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries for free.

How much does it cost?
Very little, unless your site becomes wildly popular. 1 million requests costs one dollar plus 17 cents per GB transfered. That’s right. 1,000,000 GET requests = $1.00 + $0.17/GB.

Let’s assume the average size of the elements being served from your Amazon S3 bucket is 10KB.
10KB = 0.01MB = 0.00001GB
1,000,000 requests x 0.00001GB = 10GB
10GB x $0.17/GB = $1.70
1,000,000 requests x $0.01/10,000 requests = $1.00
Total Download Cost: $2.70

Your cheap site can now support 1,000,000 requests per month for a whopping $9.65 ($6.95 for BlueHost and $2.70 for Amazon S3). And if your site gets Dugg or on the front page of Reddit, Amazon S3 will scale without sweating a drop.

Share

Comments

4 responses to “Speed Up That Cheap Website with Cheap Amazon S3”

  1. Jeremy Avatar
    Jeremy

    Here’s a great article that showcases some of Amazon’s other “cloud” services.

  2. […] this service in parallel with Amazon S3, my Bluehost-hosted site now runs significantly faster at almost no additional […]

  3. Jeremy Avatar
    Jeremy

    Take a look at my April 2009 billing statement:

    It’s really amazing how cheap Amazon S3 is.

  4. Ryan Nagy Avatar

    Thanks. I am going to use S3 to serve up some mp3 files that I would normally host on my bluehost account. I think it will make things a bit faster. I may consider using Cloudfront as well, which I believe can speed things up even more, assuming it is not a hassle to set up.

    cheers!

    Ryan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *