DreamHost recently increased the disk storage and bandwidth on their shared hosting plans. This got me wondering how it compares to the storage specific service of Amazon S3. To make things easy we’ll use the most expensive month to month costs for DreamHost and ignore the setup fee (there are plenty of coupon codes that will waive that for you). The S3 amounts are constant at $0.15 per GB of storage and $0.20 per GB transferred.
DH: Level 1 (200GB disk, 2TB bandwidth)
DH: $9.95 per month
S3: $30 (0.15 * 200GB) + $400 (0.20 * 2,000GB) = $430 per month
DH: Level 2 (300GB disk, 3TB bandwidth)
DH: $19.95 per month
S3: $45 (0.15 * 300GB) + $600 (0.20 * 3,000GB) = $645 per month
DH: Level 3 (400GB disk, 4TB bandwidth)
DH: $39.95 per month
S3: $60 (0.15 * 400GB) + $800 (0.20 * 4,000GB) = $860 per month
DH: Level 4 (500GB disk, 5TB bandwidth)
DH: $79.95 per month
S3: $75 (0.15 * 500GB) + $1,000 (0.20 * 5,000GB) = $1,075 per month
Please double check my math, because these numbers seem to be a bit on the insane side. It is possible that DreamHost has these huge numbers for each level and hopes that no one ever actually reaches them. If we can assume that both of these companies are able to make money at their respective price points then Amazon is making a killing off of S3.
This isn’t a perfect apples to apples comparison, DreamHost is a general web host, not just a storage provider. You get things like a shell account, MySQL database, etc. Since S3 focuses only on storage they provide a specific API for just that. I know DreamHost uses some sort of network attached storage (NAS) which does hourly snapshots and I’d guess is backed by some sort of RAID array. I’m sure S3 is built on a high availability network and server farm (claims 99.99% availability).
If DreamHost can keep up with performance and availability issues then they appear to be a much better deal than Amazon S3.