Host podcast files in DigitalOcean or AWS S3?

Question

i’d like to start podcasting but one of the things i have to figure out is where to host the podcast files. right now i’m using jekyll to build my site and is hosted on S3. it’s working out great. i was also think on using S3 to host the podcast files but if my calculations are correct, it would cost roughly $90 to max out 20GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth per month - which in DO only cost $5 per month.

how i got $90 is as follows. according to S3 pricing (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/), the first 1TB of storage would cost $0.03/GB. so 20GB of storage at that price is $0.60. not bad. but where the price goes up is the transfer. up to 10TB of transfer cost $0.09 per 1GB. if you calculate 1TB (1000GB), that’s $90. i didn’t factor in the request costs but it should be small. with this calculation, it looks like DigitalOcean is a better fit. did i calculate the S3 correctly and made a fair comparison?

if i host the files in DigitalOcean, i assume all i need is an ubuntu box running nginx correct?

Ritchie · Answer

Also try using a CDN solution like cloudflare.com it will speed things up, and reduce your monthly bandwidth bill, so more bandwidth available for audio files.

Ryan Quinn · Answer

You are correct, a basic install of Ubuntu with nginx should do the trick. The one thing to note is that should you get close to your 20GB limit it would require resizing the droplet which will require up to 30 minutes of downtime so be sure that you select a plan with enough space for your needs for a while. As for bandwidth, the $5 plan includes 1TB of transfer (inbound + outbound) on the public interface. Once you reach the 1TB limit in a month additional bandwidth would be billing at a rate of $0.02/Gb.

Adam Robertson · Answer

It is possible to mount DreamObjects as a folder on your droplet.

http://www.dreamhost.com/cloud/storage/

DreamObjects is 2.5cents per GB, so you could possibly use that to store files.

I use this method as my backups folder, and it works great for that. It costs me less than $1.00 per month and I back up several droplets every night… I wrote a tutorial on how to set it up:

https://firefli.de/tutorials/s3fs-and-dreamobjects.html

You could use the same method for AWS storage, but the price is slightly better for DreamObjects.

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Host podcast files in DigitalOcean or AWS S3?

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