When comparing Amazon S3 vs pCloud, the Slant community recommends pCloud for most people. In the question“What are the best cloud backup services?” pCloud is ranked 15th while Amazon S3 is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose pCloud is:
Allows you to store your HD videos, FLAC music files, and large documents.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro No file size limits
Allows you to store your HD videos, FLAC music files, and large documents.
Pro Lifetime options for storage space
Allows you to subscribe for life instead of paying every month/year.
Pro Desktop app doesn't take space on hard disk
Computers see it as a network drive.
Pro Other users can upload files to your storage
Have others upload files directly to your account from any browser using "Upload links".
Pro Cross-platform
Backup and use your files from any device with Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or iOS.
Pro Very reliable
Pro No synchronization speed limits
Sync files as fast as your internet plan allows you to.
Pro Linux client
Support for all file systems and distributions.
Pro Rewind option for FREE
Rewind option is possible for free up to 15 days back in time, 30 days back with Premium plans and you can pay for a whole year of file versioning only 39 EUR!
Pro Easy Sharing
A lot of sharing options between accounts and other non-pCloud-users.
Pro Branding of Download links
Cool branding feature possible for the videos and pictures :)
Pro Free 10gb of storage
Higher than most of the other cloud services except Mega.
Pro 2tb storage and 2tb bandwidth
Unlike all the other clouds this makes it great for sharing large files. To lots of people.
Pro Free bandwidth with ads
This is nice if you don't care about what is people see on the page when you share the file and you have large files to send.
Pro WebDAV access
Files can be accessed using WebDAV (although there is a limitation at the moment that prevents access via WebDAV if two-factor authentication is set up.. hopefully to be resolved in the near future).
Cons
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.
Con Not a well known company
Con Software develoment has bad QA
The fact the mapping issue even exists is a token of bad QA in software development.
Con Adds drivemapping without asking
The desktop app adds a P: drivemapping without asking for confirmation. Dangerous (not to say totally irresponsible) in case you already have a drive mapped.