I hope this makes sense: my business sells a website template, we currently have about 10,000 users. For various reasons that are unimportant to this question, I try to keep the file size of the zipped template we give them as small as possible. Because of this, I have taken a bunch of images and a couple of static files used by the template and moved them to external hosting. They are referenced by absolute URL in the css and markup, instead of shipping all of those images and files with every template.
So, basically 10,000+ and growing users are requesting images and files from a third-party host. I don't use my own webhosting for this because I still kind of use a medium-cheap shared hosting for my website, and if it goes down, 10,000+ users are potentially effected. Currently I'm having the template directly access files inside of an open-source google-code project that I created for just this purpose.
But, that seems like a bastardization of what a google-code repository is for, and plus, google code (i've found out) often spews 502 bad gateway errors for hours at a time.
So, anyway, my question is: where is the right kind of place to host these? Obviously I'm willing to pay. My main needs are speed and uptime, since the images and files are being requested from thousands of different websites every day.
Is this something that I should use Amazon S3 for? I'm guessing there's some kind of service exactly for this kind of need, but I'm at a loss to figure out what it is.