Companies Using Amazon S3

We detect Amazon S3 on 659,040 domains, including IBM, Siemens AG, Bank of America. A detection means the technology is present on that domain, which for large organisations is often a single storefront or subdomain rather than a company-wide deployment. Among domains we matched to a company with a resolved industry, the most common is Software Development (6.05%).

We detect 659,040 domains running Amazon S3 across our monthly crawl of live business domains. Company data could be matched for 320,035 of them (48.6%), and every company-size, industry and country breakdown on this page describes that matched subset rather than the full detected base. A further 75,639 domains carried a Amazon S3 detection previously and no longer do.

Amazon S3 holds 86.13% of the Cloud Infrastructure category, ranking #1. This is a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category — not a share of all websites, and not a share of spending — so it is not directly comparable to figures published on other denominators.

The top alternatives to Amazon S3 include DigitalOcean Spaces (5.44% market share), Google Cloud Storage (3.43% market share), Alibaba Cloud (2.45% market share), Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (1.46% market share) — measured as a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category.

United States leads with 140,580 matched Amazon S3 domains, followed by United Kingdom (26,149), Brazil (15,316), India (12,596), Canada (11,672). These are counts within the 320,035 domains we could match to a company record, not the full detected base.

The most common company size is 1-10 employees, representing 57.81% of the Amazon S3 domains we could match to a company record and size — a subset of 320,035 matched companies, not of all 659,040 detected domains. This is followed by 11-50 employees (25.15%) and 51-200 employees (9.84%).

Among the Amazon S3 domains we could match to a company with a known founding date, the largest group was founded in the 2010s (38.56%), followed by the 2020s (21.74%). That matched subset is drawn from 320,035 companies and is not representative of all 659,040 detected domains. This suggests Amazon S3 is most popular among relatively young companies.

The ideal Amazon S3 customer is: Company Size: 1-10 employees, Location: US, UK, or Brazil, City: New York, London, Seattle, Mumbai, Founded: 2010-2019, Company Age: ~7-16 years old — based on our analysis of 320,035 enriched companies at TechnologyChecker.io.

AWS changed its Free Tier in July 2025. New accounts now receive up to $200 in Free Tier credits valid for 6 months, applicable to S3 and other services. Accounts created before July 2025 still get the old model: 5 GB Standard storage, 20,000 GETs, and 2,000 PUTs per month for 12 months. After credits expire, Standard storage costs $0.023/GB/month (first 50 TB). For comparison, Cloudflare R2 charges $0.015/GB with zero egress fees.

Amazon S3 is object storage for files, images and backups. CloudFront is a CDN that caches and delivers content from S3 or another origin at edge locations worldwide. They are commonly deployed together: our crawl detects CloudFront on 26.76% of the domains where we detect S3, and detects another AWS signal on 49.17% of them.

Based on G2 review data, the top complaints are pricing complexity (167 mentions), steep learning curve for IAM and bucket policies (143 mentions), and unexpected data egress costs (112 mentions). Misconfigured bucket permissions have also caused public data exposure incidents. S3 is not a traditional file system and lacks native querying without Athena or S3 Select.

S3 Standard stores data redundantly across at least three Availability Zones within a region, delivering 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability. This means if you store 10 million objects, you can expect to lose one object every 10,000 years. S3 One Zone-IA stores data in a single AZ and is less durable but cheaper for reproducible data.

Across the 277,914 S3 domains where we hold an industry label, Software Development leads at 6.05%, followed by Retail (5.68%), Financial Services (4.60%), IT Services (4.09%) and Real Estate (3.81%). No industry reaches 7%. That flatness is expected, because our S3 signal fires on asset delivery rather than on a purchasing decision, so it tracks the shape of the web.

They are direct competitors in cloud object storage. S3 has by far the larger detected footprint in our data at 659,040 domains. The comparison is imperfect, because the two are detected by rules of different strictness and object storage is normally bought as part of a wider cloud contract rather than chosen on its own merits, so neither count reflects a head-to-head purchase.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers based on usage patterns. It shifts infrequently accessed data to lower-cost tiers (Infrequent Access after 30 days, Archive Instant Access after 90 days) without retrieval fees. The monitoring fee is $0.0025 per 1,000 objects per month. Per AWS's March 2026 20th-anniversary post, Intelligent-Tiering has saved customers over $6 billion collectively compared to S3 Standard.

Yes. S3 supports static website hosting with a custom index and error document, serving HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images directly from a bucket. In a random sample of 130 domains where we detect S3, roughly 15% returned an S3 origin header on their own homepage, which is the signature of exactly this pattern. Most production sites put a CDN in front.

Individual objects in S3 can be up to 50 TB, a 10x increase from the previous 5 TB limit announced at AWS re:Invent in December 2025. Single PUT operations support up to 5 GB; for larger files, multipart upload splits the file into parts uploaded in parallel. There's no limit on the number of objects per bucket or total storage capacity. At launch in 2006, the max was just 5 GB.

S3 offers eight storage classes. Standard ($0.023/GB) handles frequent access. Intelligent-Tiering auto-moves data between tiers. Standard-IA ($0.0125/GB) and One Zone-IA ($0.01/GB) suit infrequent access. Express One Zone, launched November 2023, delivers single-digit millisecond latency at 10x faster than Standard. Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval (minutes to hours), and Glacier Deep Archive ($0.00099/GB, 12-48 hour retrieval) cover archival workloads.

Yes. Amazon S3 is HIPAA eligible when used with a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS. S3 supports server-side encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C), access logging via CloudTrail, and fine-grained IAM policies required for HIPAA compliance. Our data shows healthcare companies like Kaiser Permanente, CVS Health, and HCA Healthcare all use S3.

S3 charges $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB/month of outbound data transfer. For a site serving 10 TB monthly, that's roughly $900 in egress alone. Cloudflare R2, an S3-compatible alternative, charges zero for egress and 35% less for storage ($0.015/GB vs. $0.023/GB). Our tech stack data shows 40.9% of S3 domains also detect Cloudflare, likely caching S3 content at Cloudflare's edge to reduce these egress bills.