I recently uploaded a static site to Amazon S3. Here is my invoice of the costs:
Let me explain these AWS transfer cost and maybe you can save some money!
I had 20GB of sermons to upload to Amazon. Here’s how I did it.
Step 1. I was trying to use SFTP to upload the talks to Amazon directly from Bluehost. I tried this three times. It got about halfway each time when Amazon terminated the connection.
Estimated 30GB of uploads.
Step 2. I zipped the files and upladed them in one go to Amazon to the S3 bucket. Then I realised I could not unzip them. Rookie error.
Another 20GB uploads.
Step 3. I used Cyberduck to transfer all the files individually using SFTP. This worked! But every single file had the wrong MIME type set. So the files downloaded instead of serving to the browser. This is apparently a well-known bug.
Another 20GB uploads.
Step 4. I used ‘Transmit’ to upload the files into the s23 Bucket – it worked!!
Another 20GB.
So overall I’m estimating 110GB of transfers to get 20GB of files onto Amazon.
If I had used Transmit the first time around it would have probably cost $20 instead of $100. I hope you can learn from my mistakes!