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Could be done with a moderate-spec single server. Replace the JBOD enclosures with on-server 8xSamsung EVOs in hardware RAID6, and gain a bit in speed because we don't have drives that slow anymore. Xeon E5v4 could replace the computational power. Network multihoming would be done the same, except with 10000baseT instead of multiple cables. Run nginx on it and you're good.

Or, one could host the entire thing on S3 with CloudFront at a fraction of the cost.

Raid 10s or bust. But otherwise correct.

> Or, one could host the entire thing on S3 with CloudFront at a fraction of the cost.

Or, you could rent capacity somewhere with decent bandwidth prices and pay 2%-20% of CloudFront/S3 bandwidth prices...

Probably just a couple of HP DL380 G8's with SSD arrays on Linux would run rings around all that kit.

Or a smallish EC2 instance and the whole of the rest in S3...

No need for an instance if there is no dynamic content. Everything in S3!

I was considering an upload gateway and administrative functions. You can't really just expose S3 on that scale.

I offered free hosting on my site for a little while, the legal issues of what people would do with free storage started to be the biggest problem. We're in a different era now.