Amazon S3, low startup cost and fast startup time.
Have you ever wanted to share some content with 50,000 of your closest friends but couldn’t find the time to setup an Akamai account? I guess Amazon’s S3 might work for you.
It just turned out that the S3 solution was ready for deployment immediately, where akamai requires more negotiation. In other words, we already had an amazon S3 account where I was test something out, and then when we noticed the bandwidth was pegged, we made a fast decision to speed up our plans to put our viewer elsewhere, and chose S3. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/10/linden_lab_amaz.html
That quick startup time is great and I love the numbers they are posting:
P.S. In case you’re curious, we switched over halfway during release day; but even for the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far- which I’d estimate to be around 30,000-38,000 downloads. This does not include the first several hours of the download rush, which are typically the highest. http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/26/amazon-s3-for-the-win/