Best and cheapest way of expanding storage on a server

Question

I provide photo editing services, so customers send their photos to me through website, and I send them back through website once edited. I need about 1TB storage when I keep files for 1 month. I'm currently using a dedicated server which costs me about $400 and also the speed is not good.

So what I am thinking to do is, host my website on digitalocean $10/month droplet. With SSD and good hardware this will provide better website browsing experience. And then for the upload and download of customer images, use Amazon S3. But how do I do that? I was trying to find a way using google and the easiest way is to mount the S3 bucket with the server. Doing it this way I think I will be charged around $160 by Amazon.

Now my biggest question is, is this the normal way to do it? Will it provide smooth service to my customers? On my website I have a file manager which customers use to upload and download. So because the server and s3 are located in two different location, will that cause speed issue which customer may notice?

What happens if incase s3 is down? Will it be re-mounted once it is back?

Help is much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Why would you run a digital ocean droplet rather than an AWS micro instance if you're considering using S3? A t2 instance would be ideal for you, micro, nano, small, you'd have to try it to be sure.

It doesn't seem like you know all that much about AWS - which is fine, everyone starts somewhere. AWS has some complexity, and it would be easy to do it badly. This is why they offer AWS architect certifications (which I have), developer certifications, sys op certification, etc.

What you want uses very little processing power. Upload files to your website via ftp or your applet, you either store then in an EBS volume or S3. S3 isn't typically mounted as disk, you may have to use an API to upload files to S3, but maybe mounting it as a disk is possible. You could probably find a script to do it for you, but really if you were doing FTP you'd just use an EBS disk unless you needed the super reliability of S3 - EBS is easily good enough for this.

Or just use dropbox, which is made for file transfer. You'd just have to work out how to give customers access to their files only, maybe there's some kind of folder based security you can use.