Using Amazon S3 to serve static content directly

There are many blog posts on the internet recommending using Amazon S3 for storing and serving static content, e.g. images, Javascript, CSS, etc., directly.

This advice has been followed by a number of well known websites. In fact many thousands of websites have followed this advice.

Amazon S3 is a good product but it simply should not be used for this.

The following graph compares the performance of Amazon S3 with Elasticera for serving images. The same image was used and pulled every 5 minutes from Amazon S3 and Elasticera. Each data point on the graph represents the average for that hour.

As you can see Elasticera is significantly faster at serving content then Amazon S3. Using Elasticera can reduce the page load time of an image intensive page, e.g. search results, product details, etc., by several seconds.