S3 Or EC2 which one's bandwidth will be used while serving image through a proxy?

Question

My server is in AWS EC2 and I am using S3 for image storage for my website, which is pretty much an image driven site. Also my site is being served over https.

Now the scenario is like that on my site any one can upload image or any one can post a third party link. As those third party links can be from any http or https site, so I decided to make a proxy for links.

Also for uploaded images, I want to show the images only to the owner of the image. To implement it also I have decided to serve those images through a proxy.

My Technology Stack is

1. PHP (YII)
2. Mysql
3. Apache
4. Node js

Now my questions are

1. If I use such proxy image server, then whose bandwidth will be used? Is it EC2 Or S3?

2. Is there any other way to solve my problem?

Answer 1

Using a proxy will use the proxy's EC2 bandwidth, not the S3 bandwidth.

If you don't want to use a proxy, you can use signed URLs to control access to the files on S3. You can provide a signed link to the content on S3. Then only people to whom you sent the link will be able to see the file on S3 (although nothing is preventing them from sharing that link).