Okay, so you hae Amazon S3, the shiny new service that, for a mere $0.15 per GB per month, you can store whatever data you want. Transfer? A mere 10 cents per gig one way, 18 cents per gig the other. $20 gets you JungleDisk so you can tap into all that triple-redundant goodness.

But why not just use your webhost to do data duties?

No, I’m not kidding. Due to their overselling policies, web hosts will give you a heckuva lot more than the above for a whole lot less, because people usually don’t use their tons of web space anyhow. Usually their websites are maybe 50 MB in size or less. But anyway, let’s compare…between S3 and 1&1…

$3.99 – 10 GB storage, 300 GB transfer. $1.50 worth of storage,but if you download\upload that amount you’re n par with S3. If you transfer a ton of data, the webhost comes out ahead. WAY ahead.

$4.99 – 120 GB storage, 1.2 TB (1,200 GB) transfer. If you use a mere third of the storage available in your package, you’ve come out quite a bit ahead of the Amazon offering. Not counting transfer. Wow.

$9.99 – 250 GB storage, 2.5 TB (2,500 GB) transfer. Again, a mere third of storage used means that 1&1 is cheaper than S3. Again, not counting transfer. Duuuuuude.

$19.99 – 300 GB storage, 3 TB (3,000 GB) transfer. Lousy deal if you ask me; you have to use more than half the storage capacity to get your money’s worth, but if you use your full allotment, you’re looking at $45/month from Amazon just to store your stuff. Another $30 to download it, another $56 to upload it.

So how do you use your web space to substitute for S3? Just encrypt your data (or don’t make it easily accessible by some other means). Then open up Windows Explorer or Finder on the Mac and point it to your web space’s FTP server. No tools needed…or if you must, FileZilla is free on Windows and CyberDuck is free on Mac.

So the advantage here is price all around, by a pretty nice margin. The $10 package on 1&1 gives you storage at a mere four cents per gigabyte per month, and your first 10x-the-storage-amount of transfer is free.

The disadvantage? Probably speed. Web servers like 1&1 have lots of people on there at the same time, cramming as many sites on a server as they can. Infrastructure, while good (20 gigabit pipes on their US facility), isn’t optimized for lightning-fast downloading. After all, your website is just text, images and flash demos right? Maybe some PDFs thrown in for good measure. All of them rather small files. Try downloading a big file from freeit4less.com and you’ll see what I mean. No, wait…we don’t have any files to download from there anymore. Anyway, the bandwidth we get is maybe 150 KB/s. Perfectly fine for little files. But big ones? Amazon downloads clock in at 2.5 MB/s on a fast enough connection (you know, college broadband).

Also, web hosts don’t charge based on usage. They charge based on package. So if you arent using up a ton of storage, they’re a flat-out lousy choice. Using 20 GB of storage and 10 GB of transfer per month? $4.40 on S3. $4.99 on 1&1. If the files are just sitting there, $3 on Amazon, $4.99 on 1&1. That’s because web hosts are out to make money on people that don’t max out the service. S3 is out to make money on customers who use the service. That’s it.

Because of this, Amazon can scale dynamically for a traffic flood. For example, if you put up your software as part of the MacHeist deal (really good deal, e-mail me if you want more info…hurry though if you’ve got a Mac…the deal ends in less than a week) Amazon will keep charging you a dime per gig for data transfer. Web hosts will just overload. That’s where the difference lies between Amazon (and guys like Cachefly) and a regular web host: the former are CDNs (content delivery networks) whereas the latter are mere places to put your website. There is a difference in performance and the mentality behind that performance.

Cool to think about though. As for me, when I need web hosting I’ll go with 1&1. For storage, I’m sticking with S3 for the moment, at least until my internet connection gets slower when I move back home for the summer, then onto cable at my non-dorm location. Shoot…they use Comcast. But wait…I don’t need storage…I use Mozy for backup. But I digress…