Comparing Services for Cheap Cloud Hosting and Storage (Cloud / AWS / S3 / Amazon Cloudfront / ... ???)

Hi folks! 👋👋👋

Some questions for all you performance aficionados and AWS / Cloud experts out there.

I'm looking for a cheap (as close to free as possible) service for:

1. Hosting AND serving images. These images will be used on a website, in emails, etc. I want to plan for:

• 100GB of added storage / month
• 100M image views (GET requests) / month
• 100K new image uploads (PUT / POST requests) / month

2. CDN / Edge caching - so as to serve requests as fast as possible. Here I am looking to reduce response times and website load times that end-users will experience.

AWS both has an amazing suite of products and at the same time is very difficult to get started with.AWS S3's pricing model is confusing. I did also play a bit with their calculator, but it's hard to say if I'm entering the numbers in correctly.

Q1: In the AWS ecosystem:

• For S3: What is "Storage pricing" vs "Request Pricing"?
• What is S3 Select and how is it different from S3?
• What is S3 Intelligent-Tiering?
• What is S3 Glacier?
• And what about Amazon CloudFront?

Q2: Is AWS the best (and cheapest) available option? What about services like:

• Cloudflare
• Cloudinary
• Photon by Jetpack etc?
• Versus using my Linode server itself for hosting and serving images?
• versus the 1000+ other options out there?

Thoughts on what service I should be using? Looking for advice from folks that are knowledgeable on the matter. 🙏🙏🙏