Lesson Two

In this video, we’re going to go over the Amazon S3 pricing table so that whenever I tell you that it’s dirt cheap, you’re going to hopefully have a better understanding of what I’m talking about.

If you recall in that first video, I showed you an image of the pricing table from way back in 2009 when storing 1 gigabyte of information was costing you 15 cents per month and now as you can see here for the standard storage it’s costing you a whopping 3 cents per gigabyte per month. There are 3 different types of storages but we’re only going to be concentrating on the standard storage because that’s what 99.9% of us are going to be using. The glacier storage, if you can this, it says cold storage. That’s where you might house your archives or your backups where you’re only going to be needing them in emergency situations. You will rarely be pulling them out. Reduced redundancy storage is kind of in between the two. You might be pulling this out on rare occasions but still it might be pulled out but that’s for the first terabyte. Again it’s monthly.

Anything above 1 terabyte up to but no more than 49 terabytes is going to cost you this amount; then again most of us are going to fall into this category right here for 3 cents a month. This is for the US standard region. Prices for your S3 account will depend on the region that you’re in but the fluctuations on these various regions is very little but throughout this video I’m only going to be using the US standard, so be sure and check the pricing for the region that you’re going to be having your buckets located in. We might touch on that a little bit more in detail whenever we get to the video on creating our buckets, but in addition to storage there’s a couple of other items that you’re being charged for on your S3 account, that is requests and data transfer.

The request is not much at all but let’s go ahead and touch on this anyway. As you can see here it’s a half a penny per 1000 request of put, copy, post, list. Not really important that you know what these are. Basically the one that you’re going to see more often is the get. Let’s look at it like this – this is where somebody is on your website viewing the image that you have hosted on your S3 account or downloading the zip files you have hosted on your S3 account or watching the videos that you have hosted on your S3 account.

As you can see here per 1000 request it’s a half a penny and you can see the cost is a lot more whenever you’re dealing with the glacier archive, so that’s why you really only put in the glacier storage what you’re rarely going to be using if at all, but here it’s a little less than half a penny per 10,000 request. I’m going to show you a copy of last month’s bill on one of my accounts to better illustrate this but again the request pricing isn’t going to amount to a whole lot. Where they are going to get you on the price is the data transfer. Now you’ve got the data transfer in, which is basically you uploading stuff, they’re not going to charge you at all with that. Upload all you want.

Where they are going to charge you is the data transfer out from your S3 account to the internet. This is what they’re referring to whenever you have your visitors on your website viewing the images that are hosted on your S3 account or downloading the zip file or watching that video that are all hosted on your S3 account. This is the ‘to internet’ this is what we’re talking about here.