We’ve been running the The-Nexus.TV website for two weeks or so. And a little bit before that, I had the hosting of the podcast audio files being handled by Amazon Web Services – S3. S3 is really great. I found a simplified non-detailed usage log in the AWS developer panel, so here’s the results of hosting the podcast files for about three weeks.
- $0.000 per GB – storage under the monthly global free tier » 0.164 GB-Mo
- $0.00 per request – PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests under the monthly global free tier » 67 Requests
- $0.00 per request – GET and all other requests under the monthly global free tier » 451 Requests
So this means over three weeks, there were nearly 70 administrative actions like uploading, setting permissions and so on, and nearly 500 GET requests. We’re using a minimal amount of storage, since we’re only saving the ready to go audio files on S3, though this would increase drastically if I included the raw audio. I also have details about the bandwidth.
- $0.000 per GB – data transfer out under the monthly global free tier » 4.281 GB
- $0.000 per GB – data transfer in per month » 0.325 GB
In just a few weeks, we’ve already used nearly 5GB of bandwidth. That sounds low, but remember most smartphones have a limit to 2GB per month. With that transfer out
value, we can guess the average usage per file by GET request. 4281 / 451 = 9.49. 10 MB is relatively tiny for the average download, which leads me to believe that there have been many partial downloads.
So this is all free. How? You get a year for free with some minimal (yet quite generous) amount of transfer, storage and GET allowances. And even if this were not free, I think our usage is fair and will be priced accordingly. This was definitely the right way to go, versus hosting the audio files myself.
