UPDATE: Now digital ocean has CDN integrated!! 😀
Hello!
I’ve been using a lot Amazon Web Services for simple storage AWS S3, in the last years.
But my bill kept getting higher and higher… of course the more you use it or store or traffic the more you pay.
A recent invoice $49.72
- Data transfer – 371.859 GB
- Storage 184.005 GB-Mo + 79.191 GB-Mo(ice) $7.97
- 3,421,797 Requests $1.37
Don’t take me wrong it’s a great service and it is worth the money!
But recently Digital Ocean launch a new storage service called Spaces. Costs $5 month 250 GB of storage 1 TB transfer … and it’s fully compatible with S3 API.
Seems to be a great replacement and a easy way to save $45 / month…
But before we do any migration (which it’s going to be painful), we need to test the service.
I use the service to store many small images, so in the test I am going to host a 2.9MB image and a reduced version of the same image of 128.6 KB.
This is not a scientific test. It’s approximate and I rely a lot in the tools used.
Test Images
- BK1A6801.JPG 2.9 MB 6720×4480
- BK1A6801-1200×800.JPG 128.6 kb 1200×800
You can download the picture and use it but not in any commercial way. I took the picture so all credit to me and the model Gala. 😉
Full Excel with all the tests and speeds here .
Object Storage conclusions
- DO Spaces location NYC3 – lacks some features, like custom domain and backups. Faster than AWS. Lot cheaper.
- AWS S3 location us-east-1 – Has more features, locations, custom domain names, other storage types, backup system, CDN cloudfront… It’s slower and more expensive.
CDN for images
Although we do not store the images in the CDN, using one speeds up a lot the delivery no matter the country. You should always use one.
I have been using since really long only Cloudflare. In the excel I have also compared them.
- Cloudflare , Free to use as CDN. Super Fast. You can’t use it on DO Spaces since does not accept custom domains, so you will not be able to use this.
- Photon API, Free CDN for wordpress sites. Please read terms. Slow on the first read. Later quite fast. Can be used in any image and you can add operations, like resize etc..
- Weserv.nl – Last time I did a similar test was much slower than Photon, but seems this has changed. Really fast uses Cloudflare distribution network to deliver images, not sure how come it’s faster than using Cloudflare directly. Slow on the first read. Can be used in any image and you can add operations, like resize etc..
- Cloudinary – They have a free tier of 10GB, later it’s expensive, offers many conversion tools and it’s the fastest. After the free tier it’s expensive. Won’t be using it.
Testing tools
I manually did the tests. As said before “This is not a scientific test. It’s approximate and I rely a lot in the tools used.”
I could not find a better testing platform for the images that Pingdom and 4 different locations. I also added Wget.
- Pingdom Melbourne Location
- Pingdom New York City Location
- Pingdom San Jose, California, Location
- Pingdom Stockholm, Sweden, Location
- Wget, Barcelona Location – Movistar fiber 50 MB synchronous using wifi.
Notes
- All images were opened before in the browser to cache them in the CDN.
- Some tests repeated specially on wget since the variation was huge specially if I was a bit further from router.