Why You Shouldn't Host Your Videos On Amazon S3

Why You Shouldn't Host Your Videos On Amazon S3
Andy Stetzinger
2-18-08


An aspect of putting videos online that is often overlooked is "where the video will be hosted."

In our newsletter, I covered concurrent connections and how much bandwidth a business site needs. We, as a company, have held firm to our position that your video needs to be hosted on a server specifically designed to handle the amount of traffic and load videos can put on a website.

While Amazon's S3 service has been around for a while, it recently came to the
attention of many online marketers. People flocked to them to host their content, pictures, videos, and all sorts of files. Recently, when High Touch and I were at a conference, we found ourselves defending our position of why we don't use the Amazon S3 Service.

1. It's Expensive
I am convinced that people don't understand the S3 model. It only works in the consumers favor if S3 is only used as a temporary, high traffic time, load balancing solution. Otherwise, bandwidth, processes, and server time end up costing over 300% of normal costs.

2. It's Untested
I refuse to push any business to edge of untested technology. Who knows what users will do to the system that engineers didn't expect? What effects will it have?

3. It's Unreliable.
A system like S3 will not be able to handle consumer demands at a reasonable rate. It's technically impossible to add, remove, or re purpose space, capacity, or bandwidth at a prudent rate for the number of users they claim to have.

4. It's Untouchable.
I like having physical acess of some kind to my servers. If there's an issue that requires me to physically be in front of the machine, I want to be able to do so. Not so with S3: your machine doesn't even exist! (it's virtual)

5. It's Unreasonable.
Read their terms and agreements. They state that while they'll try to keep access to your stuff open, if they can't, "sorry" is the best you'll get. If they happen to lose your virtual server with all of your stuff, best hope you have a backup!


Today, as a marketer, a business owner, and a geek, I feel vindicated. S3 collapsed over the weekend leaving thousands of businesses in the dark. Some startups have even claimed that they were effectively put out of business because of the S3 outage this weekend.

Understand that I am not happy or gleeful about this outage, and that my heart does go out to all of those people effected by it.

It seems that some users used the S3 service in ways that Amazon didn't expect, and Amazon could not react quickly enough to prevent a cascading failure of the S3 system.

The unexpected usage? Authentication routines. People "logging in" to some kind of a members area. It produced too much information for S3 to handle, and as a result, S3 failed. As a result of S3 failing, some people's businesses were destroyed.

Amazon's sorry for the inconvenience.

Really... They are... and that's all they have to be... it's in their Terms and Agreements.

However, the position we have held as a company is now more solid than ever before. Our media servers have withstood the onslaught of a highly effective marketing campaign while the customers credit card processing server, and their own web server suffered under the traffic.

Now the next time someone tries to make us defend our position on hosting, bandwidth, and media servers, I can simply point to the weekend of February 17th, 2008.

To learn more about KeyThing Marketing Technologies or any of our Marketing Products, please visit our website: KeyThing.com