What I observe is that most people treat Amazon S3 as a content delivery service. While this is not inherently wrong, one has to notice that S3 was especially designed to be a STORAGE service.

The point is, since terrabyte hard drives are affordable nowadays and internet traffic grows steadily, the stress goes on content delivery rather than on storage. If you are not concerned about storage, there are much better services especially suited for content delivery.

SteadyOffload.com provides an innovative, subtle and convenient way to offload static content. The whole mechanism there is quite different from Amazon S3. Instead of permanently uploading your files to a third-party host, their cachebot crawls your site and mirrors the content in a temporary cache on their servers. Content remains stored on your server while it is being delivered from the SteadyOffload cache. The URL of the cached object on their server is dynamically generated at page loading time, very scrambled and is changing often, so you don’t have to worry about hotlinking. This means that there is an almost non-existent chance that the cached content gets exposed outside of your web application.

It’s definitely worth trying because it’s not a storage service like S3 but exactly a service for offloading static content.

Watch that: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8193919167634099306 (the video shows integration with WordPress, but it is integrable with any other webpage) http://www.steadyoffload.com/ http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimization/Offloading

Cost of bandwidth comes under $0.2 per GB – affordable, efficient and convenient. Looks like a startup but lures me very much. Definitely simpler and safer than Amazon S3.

Thanks, Tal Lifschitz, http://www.cashrichmoney.com