How Using Amazon S3 Keeps Money In Your Pocket

By Lynette Chandler
A lot of people talk about using Amazon S3 because it is so affordable but don’t normally explain how it saves you money. If you’re wondering why you should pay extra to use Amazon S3 when you can embed or upload content directly into your web site, keep on reading.
No Need To Pay For What You Don’t Use
Large content files like video, audio and sometimes even PDFs eat up web space and bandwidth (also called transfer) on your web host – really fast. Once you hit that limit, your content would be inaccessible.
At that point, you will have to upgrade your web hosting package or temporarily add the extra resources you need. The cost of this upgrade varies, but you can expect a larger bill every month whether you use all those resources or not.
When you host your large files on Amazon S3, there are no limits and you only pay only for what you use. What it means to you: if you use more, you’ll pay for that extra automatically. Your content does not stop getting delivered even if your traffic spikes and a lot of people are accessing it. If you nobody accesses your content for that day, you don’t pay.
Worried About Another Monthly Bill?
The thing that worries many who haven’t used Amazon S3 before is the thought of forking over extra cash to yet another company. Surely you don’t want another monthly bill. I’m here to tell you the ‘extra’ payment is almost negligible.
For the longest time, we only paid $0.50 extra a month. Now our bill is less than $2, sometimes $3. A client of ours who used to pay $30 a month to host their weekly audio and video messages only pays $2 now.
No matter how much content you think you have, chances are, you are going to pay far, far less than what you are used to. That’s a good thing.
Saves You From Leaking Money
By default, all files uploaded to Amazon S3 is private. Nobody can access it by going to the URL directly – even if they know that it is. To deliver content to your audience, you can easily click a button to make the content accessible to everyone. Or, you can use time-limited URLs.
Sounds like a lot of super-difficult technical stuff? It’s not. Especially if you use WordPress, there are plugins that generate these time-limited URLs for you.
This limits content theft. While you can’t end it entirely, it can deter the less tech savvy thieves and frustrate others.
In short, Amazon S3 helps you deliver your content continuously without interruptions for less and limit loss of revenue.