That’s how I read, I’m having problems with migration myself. I see a lot of problems (maybe solved). And so I wonder - what is the sense of keeping the upload on s3? Is there any sense of it apart from saving costs ?
Either way, these savings are only possible if someone has a really big forum and lots of files and photos. Or maybe there are benefits?
I host my files on DigitalOcean Spaces (S3-like), and it’s really cheap and I don’t have to worry about storage, a combination I enjoy.
When someone shares an image and a bunch of us want to load it and comment and share our own photos, I like it going to a CDN and serving from there, and just let the server send text to the browsers. I don’t have a huge community, but it benefits from this workflow; I employ the same strategy in most places (blogs, wiki, chat, just about anything that allows uploads). 
Out of curiosity, if you can communicate this data, how many page views do you have in average, how much GB of uploaded files, and how much does S3 cost you each month?
From admin/reports/page_view_total_reqs:
page-view-total-reqs-200324-190518-7.csv.zip (342 Bytes)
1.4 GB / 3484 items
Spaces Subscription
$4.14
That’s because it is prorated from the $5/month for 250 GB. I use this service extensively for work, but my friendly forum doesn’t really register as an expense in comparison. 
I also build campaign sites for city and county governments that allows citizens to upload their images and pin them to maps and even remix them, and I use Spaces as backend storage for uploaded assets and it’s affordable. Let me know if you have specific concerns about the expense.
There is ~no advantage to you keeping files for your forum on S3. This is well within the load capabilities of a VPS.
Don’t worry about it until the third time you run out of disk space.
I have to admit, I don’t have a load, either. I have practically no traffic and few files. But I thought I would immediately set this up with CDN for the future to avoid problems. But as I see it, there can only be more problems than benefits…
There are an awful lot of topics with problems and I have a problem with simple
DISCOURSE_S3_BUCKET=yy
DISCOURSE_S3_REGION=eu_west_2
DISCOURSE_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=yy
DISCOURSE_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=yy
rake uploads:migrate_to_s3
To have all the files in one place and avoid trouble in the future. And unfortunately, since there are so many mistakes, I’m afraid that the further into the forest, the greater the risk.
I feel like you are talking directly at me, but your advice is not for me, so I’m not sure how to respond.
Assuming the opposite scenario. File hosting on S3 + CDN. Can it be slower then ?
I think it’s a reasonable observation, you’re paying an extra $50 a year for something your VPS can already handle. It’s an additional later of failure, an additional cost and has no real technical benefit for you right now.
These support topics aren’t always just about educating the OP. There’s no need to take offense, everyone is learning here.
So I understand to use the VPS first and then possibly move to S3 ?
Let’s say I currently have 60 GB and if 55GB is full, then change the locations of the files without moving the old ones ?