When comparing Amazon Glacier vs Amazon S3 , the Slant community recommends Amazon Glacier for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud backup services?” Amazon Glacier is ranked 21st while Amazon S3 is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Amazon Glacier is:
$0.007 per gigabyte per month is comparatively cheap and allows for large amounts of cloud storage.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extermely low-cost
$0.007 per gigabyte per month is comparatively cheap and allows for large amounts of cloud storage.
Pro Free for small sites
The free tier will cover most personal home pages.
Pro Easily scalable
There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.
Pro Super cheap with a year's worth of free service
S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.
Pro Fast setup
You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.
Pro Fast
S3 is fast even without a CDN.
Pro Easy to setup with CDN
Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.
Pro Supports custom root domains
To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.
Pro No security risks
There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.
Cons
Con Not a backup service
Using Amazon Glacier for backup requires learning and setting up third-party tools.
Con Data transfer out >1GB costs money
Retrieving a backup over 1GB costs money starting at $0.090 for 10GB.
Con Can't get to data instantly
Data retrieval can take several hours to initiate.
Con Credit card needed
Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.
Con Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing
By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.
Con Confusing web interface
Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.
Con No SFTP support
Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.