Heroku + Paperclip + Amazon S3 - Pricing?

21
votes

Since Heroku is a read-only filesystem I can't use paperclip to store a small quantity of files on the server. Database image storage is an option, but not particularly ideal since that may crank my client's DB size up from a few hundred KB to over the 5 MB 'free' shared DB limit (depending on size of images).

That leaves Amazon S3 as a likely solution. I understand that Heroku is hosted on EC2 (I believe?). Amazon's pricing wording was a little bit confusing when referring to S3-EC2 file transfers. If I have my client setup an S3 account and let them do file transfers to and from there, what is the pricing going to look like?

Is it cheaper from an S3 point-of-view to to both upload and download data in the rails controllers, and then feed the data to the browser using send_file? Or would it make more sense to just link straight to the image or pdf from the browser like normal?

Would my client have to pay anything at all since heroku is hosted on Amazon? I was looking for other questions related to this but there weren't any really straight answers concerning which parts of the file transfer would be charged for.

I guess the storage would cost a little (hardly anything), but what about the bandwidth? Thanks :)

2
ruby-on-railsamazon-s3herokupaperclip
Good question, I was just wondering the exact same thing today. – Kaleb Brasee
aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing – Jordi
Heroku also has an add-on for image storage which starts at free: addons.heroku.com/cloudinary – Chloe

2 Answers

11
votes

Is it cheaper from an S3 point-of-view to to both upload and download data in the rails controllers, and then feed the data to the browser using send_file? Or would it make more sense to just link straight to the image or pdf from the browser like normal?

From an S3 standpoint, yes, this would be free, because Heroku would be covering your transfer costs. HOWEVER: Heroku only lets a script run for 30 seconds, and during that time, other clients wont be able to load the site, so this is really a terrible idea. Your best bet is to serve the files out of S3 directly, in which case, yes your customer would be transfer between S3 and the end user.

Any interaction you have with the file from Heroku (i.e. metadata and what not) will be free because it is EC2->S3.

For most cases, your pricing would be identical to what it would be if you were not using heroku. The only case where this would change would be if your app is constantly accessing the data directly on S3 (to read metadata/load files)

1
votes

You can use Paperclip on Heroku - just not the local file system for storage. Fortunately Paperclip can use s3 for storage. Heroku has a tech article here that covers it.

Also when an asset that's been uploaded is displayed on a page (lookup asset_host) the image would be loaded directly from your s3 buckets URL so you will pay Amazon for a get request to the image and then for data transfer involved but also for storing the assets on s3. Have you looked at the s3 calculator to get indicative costs?