How Amazon S3 and EC2 Can Cut Your Hosting Bills in Half
When I first interviewed for Heavy, Scott Penberthy told me he wanted to make Heavy.com and future products be able to run in the local Starbucks.
What exactly did he mean by that? The simple answer I would soon learn was that he wanted to reduce our infrastructure overhead drastically. Heavy, like many popular online destinations, have hefty hosting fees (Storage + Bandwidth + Monthly Server Rentals). When I found out what the current infrastructure costs were, I almost died. Heavy serves a ton of videos, so naturally it costs a boat load of money to keep this puppy running and that’s where AWS comes in. AWS is just so cheap compared to Rackspace…how could Heavy ignore the possible cost savings (EC2 Pricing / S3 Pricing).
I’m happy to report over the past year, Heavy has made some serious progress with Amazon Web Services. The development team is really amazing and I’m proud to be apart of it.
I’m not going to go into anymore details, because Scott made a really amazing write up about how we reduced storage and bandwidth fees drastically and made Rackspace shit in their pants once they realized what we were doing.
Amazon AWS vs. Rackspace and Akamai
In addition to saving money, the team created a suit of tools for AWS, a control panel for administrating EC2 Instances, as well as built an entire product on top of the EC2 cloud.
Mike Brittain also posted an excellent article explaining How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2.
I recommend reading both articles, especially if you plan on using AWS in the future.