Does this sound familiar?
Your hosting bill keeps climbing.
Your site slows down during campaigns.
Your host blames “traffic spikes” and suggests you upgrade to a bigger plan.
If you’ve experienced any of the above…You’re using the wrong tool for the job.
Web servers run websites.
They’re not built to serve hundreds of product images, video files, and downloadable resources to thousands of visitors at once.
That’s what Amazon S3 does.
Most Businesses Stuff Everything On One Server
Australian small businesses usually start with shared hosting.
$20 to $100 per month gets you online.
Cheap and simple.
But everything lives on that one server.
WordPress files.
Product images.
Videos.
PDFs.
Blog graphics.
Every asset competing for the same resources.
We spoke to David Krauter the founder of Websites That Sell which is a digital marketing agency specialising in Web Design, Development, SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads and Social Media Marketing servicing Australian business owners across Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Sunshine Coast & the Gold Coast.
David noted “we see this pattern constantly. Clients run a Facebook ad campaign. Traffic jumps. Site crawls. Images take 5 seconds to load on mobile. People bounce. Ads cost more. Google drops their rankings.”
And research backs this up.
Google’s research analysing 11 million mobile landing pages found the average mobile page takes about 15 seconds to fully load. And 53% of mobile visitors leave if a page takes more than three seconds to load.
That’s a site architecture problem, not a hosting problem.
Web Servers vs Object Storage
Your web server runs your site. It processes PHP. Connects to your database. Handles forms and checkout. That’s what it’s good at.
AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage. Built specifically to store and deliver static files. Images. Videos. PDFs. CSS files. JavaScript libraries. Anything that doesn’t change.
Your web server is a chef. S3 is a pantry. You wouldn’t ask a chef to also store all your ingredients while cooking. That’s inefficient.
When someone visits your site, your server handles the dynamic stuff (loading the page, processing checkout) while S3 handles the static stuff (serving images, videos, PDFs).
Split these tasks. Everything gets faster and cheaper.
What This Actually Costs
Traditional Hosting:
Australian small business website on shared hosting: $20-$100/month. When you grow and need more resources, you get pushed to VPS hosting ($50-$200/month) or managed hosting ($100-$300/month).
You’re paying for server resources you don’t need. All because you’re storing media files on a server designed to run code.
S3 Approach:
S3 Standard storage costs $0.023 per GB for the first 50TB. Say your marketing assets total 100GB (product images, videos, PDFs). That’s $2.30 per month for storage.
Data transfer out to the internet starts at $0.09 per GB for the first 10TB. If you serve 500GB of images and videos per month, that’s $45.
Total: roughly $47/month for storage and delivery of all your marketing assets. No server upgrade needed.
But the real savings aren’t in the hosting bill. They’re in what doesn’t break.
Where You’re Actually Losing Money
Page speed directly impacts conversion rates. Research from Portent found that a site loading in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site loading in 5 seconds.
Small example: You run an ecommerce store doing $50,000/month with a 2% conversion rate. Site loads in 5 seconds because it’s image-heavy.
Move product images to S3. Page load drops to under 2 seconds. Conversion rate could jump to 6%. That’s potentially $150,000/month instead of $50,000/month.
Even a 20% improvement is $10,000 extra revenue monthly. Your hosting cost difference? Maybe $50/month.
Do the math.
When S3 Makes Sense
S3 isn’t always the answer. For a simple 5-page brochure site with a few images, shared hosting is fine.
But if you tick any of these boxes, S3 probably makes sense:
You run ads or campaigns. Traffic spikes kill slow servers. S3 scales automatically.
You have lots of product images. Ecommerce sites with hundreds of product photos benefit immediately.
You use video content. Video files are massive. Serving them from your web server is expensive and slow.
You need different versions of images. Mobile, desktop, thumbnails. S3 can serve optimised versions without duplicating storage.
Your site gets international traffic. S3 can serve content from edge locations closer to your visitors.
This isn’t about chasing technology. It’s about using the right tool for the right job.
How It Works
You upload your images, videos, and static files to an S3 bucket. Think of this as a folder in the cloud.
Then you update your website to pull those assets from S3 instead of your web server. Usually just a URL change. Instead of yoursite.com/image.jpg, it becomes your-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/image.jpg.
Your web server focuses on running your site. S3 focuses on delivering assets. Both do what they’re built for.
Most WordPress sites can do this with a plugin. WooCommerce stores can offload product images. Custom sites just need the URLs updated.
We’ve implemented this for clients running seasonal Facebook ad campaigns who constantly hit server limits. Site would slow down, bounce rates would spike, ad costs would climb. After moving landing page assets to S3, traffic spikes no longer mattered. Page load times stayed consistent. Ad costs dropped because landing page experience scores improved.
Technical setup took less than a day. The cost savings and performance gains are ongoing.
Security and Reliability
S3 is designed for 99.999999999% durability. That’s 11 nines. More reliable than your web server. Amazon designed it to lose one object every 10,000 years if you store 10 million objects.
Your web server? If it goes down, your site goes down. If your S3 bucket has an issue (rare), your static assets are affected but your site still functions.
Security is configurable. You can make buckets public (for images everyone should see) or private (for customer downloads). You control access with policies, just like file permissions on your server.
For Australian businesses, you can choose Sydney-based data centres. Assets stay local. Performance stays fast.
The Mobile Problem
Mobile accounts for 54.67% of global traffic. In Australia, 55.45% comes from mobile. But web pages load 70.9% slower on mobile than desktop.
Why? Slower connections. Less processing power. And web servers doing too much.
Offload assets to S3 and your server does less work. Mobile load times improve.
Vodafone tested this. A 31% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint (when main content loads) led to 8% more sales.
Fixing slow mobile performance doesn’t require expensive hosting upgrades. Moving assets to S3 costs $50-$100/month. The return is immediate.
When Traditional Hosting Still Works
S3 isn’t magic.
t’s just a better tool for certain jobs.
If your site is:
- Simple and low-traffic
- Mostly text with minimal images
- Not running high traffic ads or marketing campaigns
- Not ecommerce
Stick with traditional hosting.
No point overcomplicating things.
But if you’re running a business where site performance directly impacts revenue, the cost difference between traditional hosting and S3 is negligible compared to what you lose from slow pages.
What This Means
Most Australian businesses treat hosting like a fixed cost.
Pay the bill.
Hope it works.
Upgrade when forced to.
But hosting architecture is a performance decision. Where you store your assets impacts how fast your site loads. How fast your site loads impacts conversions, rankings, and ad costs.
S3 isn’t about saving $20 on your hosting bill. It’s about making sure your server does what it’s good at while your assets get delivered by infrastructure built specifically for that purpose.
The businesses that get this right don’t just save money. They get faster sites, better user experiences, and more conversions.
The ones that don’t?
They keep upgrading hosting plans wondering why performance never improves.
The infrastructure matters. Not because it’s fancy. Because it works.
