How to overcome S3 bucket DTO for large file downloads?

Question

We have a s3 bucket containing our game installer of 12GB. We want people to download it obviously from a link. But the issue is since the data transfer out in S3 is expensive, the AWS bills are shooting up. Can someone suggest an alternative for S3 buckets or a different approach where users can download our installer, but can overcome this DTO fee which is insanely high in this case? Will using Cloudfront help reduce the costs significantly in this case?

Answer

Hi
Cloudfront seems effectively to be one way of optimizing costs: see https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/cost-optimizing-your-aws-architectures-by-utilizing-amazon-cloudfront-features/

On this topic, this article is interesting: https://www.stormit.cloud/blog/amazon-cloudfront-pricing-how-to-approach-it-and-save-money/

Best,

Didier

Answer

Using CloudFront reduces Data Transfer costs for 3 reasons:
1) DTO of CloudFront is less than DTO of S3
2) CloudFront Free Tier covers the first 1 TB per month
3) Data transfers from S3 to CloudFront are free

For example, S3 DTO (in N.Amer) for the first 10 TB/month costs $0.09 per GB while CloudFront DTO for the First 10TB/month (in N.Amer) is $0.085 per GB. Both services have lower $/GB as volume increases but the rate of decrease is the same making CloudFront always the most cost-effective approach.

Also, the cost for each edge location varies. So, specifying price classes may further reduce DTO costs by excluding CloudFront edge locations that have a higher cost.

How to overcome S3 bucket DTO for large file downloads?

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