Comments on: IDEA #56 – Web Hosting Company using Amazon S3

By: netfirms coupon

netfirms coupon — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:50:00 +0000

This is really a huge space for website and its FTP. This is plan may be helpful for any large database website. I really like this plan.

By: Ashutosh

Ashutosh — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 03:01:20 +0000

Its an interesting idea, which is already in the works. PAYG Web Hosting: http://www.nilkanth.com/archives/2007/08/02/payg-web-hosting/

By: John

John — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:25:19 +0000

@Scott- You’re incorrect: S3 pricing is $.01/10,000 requests, specifically:

$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

In addition to:

$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB

By: ChandraB

ChandraB — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:53:45 +0000

@Scott: You pointed out exactly what I wanted to
say…you could potentially lose your shirt. If someone really wanted to be nasty, they could right a little program to do nothing but perform these file requests in a loop and there isn’t a damn thing you could do about it…could you even detect it to stop the process?

By: Michael St. Hilaire

Michael St. Hilaire — Thu, 03 May 2007 15:18:08 +0000

It’s a good idea. In a previous venture, we actually started working on this. We were going to build a flikr like site but for any type of file. Myspace addons for viewing/downloading files, desktop uploaders, etc.

There’s a lot of competition in this market though, big barrier to entry there.

By: Blendah Tom

Blendah Tom — Thu, 03 May 2007 01:34:12 +0000

Hi Steve,

I think a company like http://www.elasticlive.com/ is already playing in this area..

By: Douglas

Douglas — Thu, 03 May 2007 01:30:00 +0000

Steve,

Web hosts like GoDaddy, DreamHost, 1&1, and so on depend on overselling to pay their bills. The average web hosting customer will not use anywhere near 5 GB of storage or 250 GB of bandwidth – it’s very rare. Consider a DreamHost plan that offers something like 200 GB of space and 7 TB (yes, terabytes) of bandwidth for like $8 a month. Plus, you can find a discount to get $90 off for the first year. It’s ridiculous how much those companies oversell, but it makes for a very nice business.

Every web hosting provider I know of (I’ve worked in and covered the industry for several years) does all of their storage in-house. Some use dedicated storage servers (I believe DreamHost does), but they very very rarely outsource it to a provider like Amazon.

A majority of web hosts, especially those offering huge packages like GoDaddy or DreamHost depend on overselling. I would be willing to bet a very large sum that if every one of DreamHost’s customers started to use 99% of their allowed resources, that their entire datanceter would go down and they would go bankrupt quite quickly.

Overselling is a great model – it just has to be done carefully and correctly to maintain quality.

By the way, if you are interested in Amazon’s forays into the web hosting industry, grid hosting, and all of those things, get in touch with Isabel Wang. She’s quite interested in that area.

By: Daryn

Daryn — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:37:16 +0000

If you were trying to be a cutrate hosting provider, you’d probably make much better margins at volume doing it yourself than using AWS. That said, people like godaddy are often using web hosting as loss leaders, hoping to upsell hosting customers into their more lucrative products like ssl certificates.

By: Scott T.

Scott T. — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:36:40 +0000

Yes, but Amazon is changing the S3 pricing model to add $.01 fee per request. Web sites have many, small, frequently requested files — and you’d be paying (X+1) * $.01 per page view where X is the number of images, css files, external javascript files, etc served up from the same server for that page. Ouch!