title: Affordability of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
body: <p>I have a website that attracts about 30,000 visitors per month.  It has a lot of photos and PDF files which eat up a good deal of bandwidth. It's hosted by site5.com, which offers unlimited bandwidth &amp; storage for ~$5 per month. According to site5's statistics, my site has about 20 GB of downloads per day, but I've seen it as high as 116 GB.  Uploads range from 5-15 GB daily.  (Though, I don't really upload things everyday, so I don't know where they get those numbers from.)</p>
  
  <p>In anticipation of growing my site even more, perhaps by hosting videos, high-res photos, etc., I was looking into other storage options, even though site5 has been pretty good. Specifically, amazon.com's <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Simple Storage Service</a> (S3) looks pretty good and is supposed to be a "highly scalable, reliable, fast, <strong>inexpensive</strong> data storage infrastructure."</p>
  
  <p>Using Amazon's <a href="http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Simple Monthly Calculator</a>, I multiplied out my worst-case scenario numbers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Storage: 2 GB
  Data Transfer-in: 15 GB/day * 31 days = 465 GB/month
  Data Transfer-out: 116 GB/day * 31 days = 3596 GB/month
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>With those numbers alone, the calculator estimates my monthly bill to be a whopping $658.27!!! That's insane!  Is anyone here using S3?  Are your bills outrageous? </p>