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And This Too…

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Jon Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare.net (previously featured here) sent me some cool comments that just happen to reinforce the Web-Scale message I’ve been talking about recently. Here’s what he had to say (links are mine):

The dedicated hardware we were initially considering would have cost $1000 to startup, and $800/month in ongoing costs. Most importantly, this would have meant 1 month in time-to-market lost as we configured the hardware and customized and tested our software on it!

Hearing about the success that SmugMug had, we looked at their html, and realized that it would be simple to use S3 for our purposes. It took less than one day to switch our code over to S3 (using the Ruby library provided by Amazon), with no support from anyone at Amazon.

S3 provided a scalable solution from day one. A massive surge in traffic doesn’t stress our own system: in fact on the first day our site was hosting embeds on techcrunch and similar sites without any problems. And our costs using S3 have been 16 times lower than they would have been using dedicated hardware, since we only pay for what we use.

What more can I say? Jon’s doing my job for me, and I couldn’t be happier!

— Jeff;

Modified 10/23/2020 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.