LESSON 1 · 2 MIN · ONE FILM
What S3 is, without the acronyms
A building full of shelves that Amazon rents by the shelf. You never see the building. You see a list of files.
1 CHAPTER
A SHORT COURSE · 6 LESSONS · 25 CHAPTERS · ABOUT 47 MINUTES
Keeping files in S3 costs a coffee. Getting them back out costs dinner.
Amazon S3 explained for the people who pay the bill, not the people who built it. Every answer starts with the number, then ties it to something you already own: your phone, your inbox, your Word files.
Six lessons
Read in order, or jump to the one that hurts.LESSON 2 · 12 MIN · ONE FILM
The cheap half: $2.30 for 100 GB
A hundred gigabytes is 25,000 phone photos. Keeping them costs a coffee a month. This is the half everyone prices, and the smaller one.
6 CHAPTERS
LESSON 3 · 12 MIN · ONE FILM · THE ONE PEOPLE SKIP
The other half: $83 to download 1 TB
Every download, every restore, every byte that leaves the building has a price. Storing is rent. This is the moving truck.
6 CHAPTERS
LESSON 4 · 10 MIN · ONE FILM
Opening files without becoming an engineer
Reading a PDF should not need a console login. What works in a browser, and what does not.
6 CHAPTERS
LESSON 5 · 9 MIN · ONE FILM
Sending files to people, safely
Links that expire, clients without AWS accounts, and the one setting that keeps the bucket private.
5 CHAPTERS
LESSON 6 · 2 MIN · ONE FILM
Making the bill smaller this month
Four changes that cut most S3 bills, and the free check that tells you which ones apply to yours.
1 CHAPTER
Your bill, in plain terms
Pick how much you keep and how often people pull it out.YOUR BILL IN PLAIN TERMS
I keep
people pull it out
- Rent for a decade of office paperwork
- about $25 a month
- The truck, all of it leaves once a month
- about $85 a month
- Rent if it sat in the deep archive
- about $1 a month
Downloads cost about 4 times the rent. That is the half nobody budgets for.
Rounded on purpose. The exact rates live in the pricing guide.What is my bucket costing me?
See what my buckets cost S3 Savings reads three months of your real S3 bill and shows which of these answers apply to your buckets. Free, read-only, no card.