Question

I’m moving an application onto Heroku and subsequently realised I’ll need to set up an S3 bucket in the states where currently it’s in the EU. This is to avoid having to pay for transfers.

What isn’t clear to me is which US S3 bucket I should choose. I’m presented with Northern California and US Standard Regions but cannot find anything to clarify which of these I should choose.

Thank in advance.

Answer 1

There isn’t really a choice to make, other than to pick the region which is geographically closest to the consumer of the S3 resources – and that only for latency reasons. From the S3 pricing page:

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of an Amazon S3 Region. There is no Data Transfer charge for data transferred within an Amazon S3 Region via a COPY request. Data transferred via a COPY request between Regions is charged at regular rates. There is no Data Transfer charge for data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 within the same Region or for data transferred between the Amazon EC2 Northern Virginia Region and the Amazon S3 US Standard Region. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 across all other Regions (i.e. between the Amazon EC2 Northern California and Amazon S3 US Standard Regions) will be charged at Internet Data Transfer rates on both sides of the transfer.