Re: What happens when the cloud is down?

Blagovest — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:25:43 -0000

There is a very important question you have to ask yourself before deciding whether to use S3: what are you really looking for - remote storage, content delivery, or both. These are crucial to distinguish.

What I observe is that most people treat Amazon S3 as a content delivery service. While this is not inherently wrong, one has to notice that S3 was especially designed to be a STORAGE service. S3 does not claim to be a CDN.

The point is, since terabyte hard drives are affordable nowadays and internet traffic grows steadily, the stress goes much more on content delivery and network infrastructure rather than on storage. If you are not concerned about using remote storage, there are much better services especially suited for content delivery.

SteadyOffload.com provides an innovative, subtle and convenient way to offload static content. The whole mechanism there is quite different from Amazon S3. Instead of permanently uploading your files to a third-party host, their cachebot crawls your site and mirrors the content in a temporary cache on their servers. Content remains stored on your server while it is being delivered from the SteadyOffload cache. The URL of the cached object on their server is dynamically generated at page loading time, very scrambled and is changing often, so you don’t have to worry about hotlinking. This means that there is an almost non-existent chance that the cached content gets exposed outside of your web application.

It’s definitely worth trying because it’s not a storage service like S3 but exactly a service for offloading static content.

Watch that:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-819391... (the video shows integration with WordPress, but it is integrable with any other webpage)
http://www.steadyoffload.com/
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimizati...

Cost of bandwidth comes under $0.2 per GB - affordable, efficient and convenient. Looks like a startup but lures me very much. Definitely simpler and safer than Amazon S3.

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Re: What happens when the cloud is down?