Why not just increase the size of this server? They've got this one server that has managed for years, does it really need to be more complicated than "a bigger server"?<p>> This averages to about 925 requests per second and an average bandwidth of 1.2 gb per second.<p>Although the bigger question is why they stopped using S3 at all - they never had to think about this problem again and it sounds like this has cost them heavily in dev-time over the years. AWS pricing can suck but lots of vendors have S3-compatible storage backends with better pricing.