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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.

Atiqur Rahman Sumon
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  • Possible duplicate of [Can you help me with my capacity planning?](http://serverfault.com/questions/384686/can-you-help-me-with-my-capacity-planning) – user9517 Feb 19 '16 at 05:44

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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.

Tim
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  • You are right I'm not very good in AWS, and I think you are right AWS will be better. And I may not eventually be interested in S3 because I used the AWS calculator and it seems like using EBS will not cost too much as compared to S3. However with EBS, I noticed that I can only add volume of 1TB, that maybe an issue at some point. So your suggestion maybe good but price wise it will be slightly expensive but more stable solution. – Atiqur Rahman Sumon Feb 20 '16 at 20:35
  • S3 is a lot cheaper per GB. It's not particularly difficult to upload files from EC2 to S3, you can mount it as a disk but you're better off using the S3 API. Consider using S3 reduced redundancy storage. Given this is for short term storage not archiving you probably don't need to bother with anything fancy - just have people FTP files to your instance, download the files yourself, send them the resulting jpg/catalog/xmp files, then delete the results two weeks later. Disk storage required will be relatively limited. – Tim Feb 20 '16 at 22:13
  • I'm not familiar integrating S3 with EC2 using API, is that too difficult? Is there standard library that can be used or do I need to hire somebody to write it for me? I want to offer customers a file manager from website to up/download, at the same time offer them FTP facility so that those are comfortable with FTP they can use it. Although FTP is not secure so I'm thinking what I can do on that, is FTPS a solution? I'm also thinking about using Dropbox business but don't know how I can have multiple accounts for customers keeping the cost down. Should I post a new topic for this question? – Atiqur Rahman Sumon Feb 20 '16 at 22:19
  • S3 has a standard API and there will be thousands of examples online. Yes there are two forms of SFTP. You need far more help and support than can be provided here. Suggest you contact me via the link in my profile for proper help and advice, I specialize in helping photographers - I'm a professional photographer who uses an outsourced image processor myself (Lavalu) as well as being AWS certified. – Tim Feb 20 '16 at 23:25