Amazon S3 vs Google Storage vs VPS Speed Test

Google Storage for Developers is a new cloud based storage service that is currently open to a limited number of developers in the US. With Google Storage, Google is now a direct competitor to Amazon’s family of Cloud based web solutions, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. Well I just received my invite for Google Storage for Developers and my first order of business was too test Google Storage’s speed vs Amazon’s S3 speed and my VPS’s speed (added Amazon CloudFront Speeds).

I have been using Amazon’s S3 and CloudFront service to serve static image files for the past 6 months and have been very happy with their speed and reliability. I also recently switch from a shared web hosting solution to an unmanaged VPS hosting service and wanted to see if my LAMP VPS server would be faster than Amazon S3.

I chose 3 images with varying sizes, 1 small (4.83k .png), 1 medium ( 389k .jpg) and 1 large (5.65mb .jpg) and loaded them up multiple times (no cache). Here are the speeds I ended up with. Note these test results are meant to be taken with a grain of salt. This is just an example of the speeds you will find with these types of services.

All speeds are averages.

The clear winners in the test were Google Storage For Developers and Amazon CloudFront, with my LAMP VPS in a distant fourth. Amazon S3 actually performed better then Google Storage with the large image file, but was slower then Google Storage in the small and medium size image test. One aspect of the test that I found very interesting is that my LAMP VPS was very consistent in it’s speeds where Google Storage, Amazon S3, and CloudFront were not. Nevertheless, this test does show that geography is a very important factor when serving image files on the web.

So what does this all prove? Something, but not everything. It does show that serving images from the cloud is a better solution then your LAMP VPS and also shows Amazon CloudFront is faster then Amazon S3 (to be expected). Perhaps a LEMP VPS would perform better, but that still does not address the problem with geography. I will be sticking with Amazon S3 and CloudFront for now, but may move to Google Storage in the future. If you are interested in trying out Amazon’s Cloud based services you can follow the link below. As of right now you will need to request an invite before trying Google Storage For Developers.

Google Storage For Developers
Amazon Web Services

Feel free to share any test you have done yourself if the comments section below.

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