# Amazon S3 170 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon S3 and 84 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 14 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A highly reliable, scalable object store with a simple, widely copied API that is cheaper than building your own, though its API has accumulated quirks and costs can surprise. ## Why people recommend it - Extremely reliable and durable (6 comments): "it's a extremely reliable, infinitely-scalable, strongly consistent (in some implementation), cheap, and extremely simple to use key-value store" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925764)) "S3 is and was an amazing resource for normal people. Extremely reliable cloud storage for backup, for distribution, for anything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49612102)) "Their metrics are, quite honestly, absolutely impossible for most engineering teams and companies to ever achieve" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383758)) - Cheaper than building it yourself (5 comments): "The nice thing about S3 is even if you screw up your usage patterns, you can pay/engineer your way out guaranteed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45940837)) "It's cheaper to pay S3 to deal with the problem than to have a full team dealing with bit rot from RAID issues." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058389)) "S3 is still magnitudes cheaper, faster, and more redundant than anything you could put together yourself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871544)) - Simple API, de facto standard (5 comments): "it's a extremely reliable, infinitely-scalable, strongly consistent (in some implementation), cheap, and extremely simple to use key-value store" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925764)) "Either you use something like the S3 interface, or you waste your time implementing a clone of what S3 already supports." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337546)) "The range of things you can do with blob storage and a (very simple) auth model are surprisingly broad." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49924986)) - Conditional writes enable coordination (4 comments): "The quiet improvements to S3 over the last 3 years like conditional puts unlocked a lot of use cases not previously feasible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292587)) "the coordination layer/control-plane is all S3 CAS of dumb json files, which is a fantastic common-mode infra requirement" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189393)) "S3 is strongly consistent, if you need it anyways you can just use s3 keys to deconflict and store the workflow state." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48327215)) ## What people warn about - API shows accumulated cruft (5 comments): "Originally the first S stood for "Simple". With all the additions they've had to bolt on, S2 would be far more appropriate a name." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138141)) "Another weird thing is that `foo/` is a valid object name in s3, so you can have both `foo/` and `foo` be different files." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820819)) "decision to make bucket (and not bucket + account id surrogate) a sole key for access was one of most annoying mistakes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363988)) - Pricing and surprise charges (4 comments): "For reference transit cost has dropped over the years and is now about at $0.000247/GB or free if there is a peering agreement" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871942)) "AWS have found the ideal captive market: computer engineers who don't know how computers work or how much they should cost." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926582)) "trying to fix the monthly bleed with a Lifecycle Policy nearly had a seven figure charge on top of it all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832568)) - Key prefix quirks (3 comments): "Another weird thing is that `foo/` is a valid object name in s3, so you can have both `foo/` and `foo` be different files." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820819)) "there were also some implementation specifics like throughput limits based on key prefixes (that one vanished circa 2016)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47681544)) "Even teams that use prefixes for performance don't have an S3-native way to ask what a prefix represents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48005881)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Cloudflare R2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-r2.md): 85 recommend - [Backblaze B2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/backblaze-b2.md): 50 recommend - [AWS S3](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-s3.md): 17 recommend - [Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-s3-glacier-deep-archive.md): 16 recommend - [Wasabi object storage](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wasabi.md): 10 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Amazon S3", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-s3/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).