x-amz-storage-class: REDUCED_REDUNDANCY
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Server: AmazonS3
What advantages? If you're running these as headless servers, then what advantages does OSX possibly provide over cheaper, more powerful Linux boxes using e.g. ImageMagick (ok, ok, not having massive remote code execution vulnerabilities is one of them).
(Guessing they use the fastly private cdn or have some sort of deal with them considering the imgix branded cages on their blog).
The founder, Vlad, used to rent out cheap dedicated boxes with about 500gb of bandwidth per box for $60 to $80 per month. He'd cycle upload machines - eg 123.imagevenue.com - and fill up the drives on them until no more space was available; when bandwidth was exhausted, that was that for the month. Typically image file downloads would decline on any given upload over time, so machine resources would free back up in terms of bandwidth and deleting images that weren't viewed after N amount of time.
I made a Skylake Xeon system with all enterprise components for $2k. You can't even rent Skylake Xeons anywhere right now.
It of course depends on your provider.
Rent vs buy depends a lot on the circumstances. Maybe if your requirements don't change and you don't upgrade your server hardware it's cheaper in the long run to buy. However, when I've kept a server for more than a year, I've always been able to negotiate a discount.
You didn't post your config, so I can't tell how exotic your requirements are.
Any dedicated hosting company (OVH, Hetzner, etc...) will cost less than 3% of that (and that's on the high end).
Bandwidth is cheap, but AWS marks it up roughly 30x-50x what you'd pay in a dedicated environment.
And you pay premium for premium bandwidth. You can't just assume that all your users will have a good experience if you buy hardware and bandwidth from the cheapest providers around.
What's the minimum commercially you'd spend to get cross-continent redundancy on hardware you manage in-house. Just the accounting cost of paying wages for technicians in two countries probably means you need to be a quite large company.
There are middle grounds, managed co-location say, but then you're not likely to save much over using AWS are you?
Another way to do it is to use dedicated servers. The datacenter will take care of repairs and remote hands functions and all you need is to manage the server from the OS level upwards. No need to have technicians in multiple countries, everything can be done remotely.
That's not how things work over here.
We can and do imagine. We even calculate estimate values so we don't have to stay in the dark and reason without a solid basis.
I'd encourage you to find some traffic numbers provided by imgur and some S3 pricing to do a rough estimate. Maybe someone more knowledgable will pop in and improve on that. When we argue everyone involved shall be wiser after. That's how it works around here.