Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Bucket restrictions and limitations

An Amazon S3 bucket is owned by the Amazon Web Services account that created it. Bucket ownership is not transferable to another account.

When you create a bucket, you choose its name and the Amazon Web Services Region to create it in. After you create a bucket, you can't change its name or Region.

When naming a bucket, choose a name that is relevant to you or your business. Avoid using names associated with others. For example, you should avoid using AWS or Amazon in your bucket name.

By default, you can create up to 100 buckets in each of your Amazon Web Services accounts. If you need additional buckets, you can increase your account bucket quota to a maximum of 1,000 buckets by submitting a quota increase request. There is no difference in performance whether you use many buckets or just a few.

For information about how to increase your bucket quota, see Amazon service quotas in the Amazon General Reference.

Reusing bucket names

If a bucket is empty, you can delete it. After a bucket is deleted, the name becomes available for reuse. However, after you delete the bucket, you might not be able to reuse the name for various reasons.

For example, when you delete the bucket and the name becomes available for reuse, another Amazon Web Services account might create a bucket with that name. In addition, some time might pass before you can reuse the name of a deleted bucket. If you want to use the same bucket name, we recommend that you don't delete the bucket.

For more information about bucket names, see Bucket naming rules.

Objects and bucket limitations

There is no max bucket size or limit to the number of objects that you can store in a bucket. You can store all of your objects in a single bucket, or you can organize them across several buckets. However, you can't create a bucket from within another bucket.

Bucket operations

The high availability engineering of Amazon S3 is focused on get, put, list, and delete operations. Because bucket operations work against a centralized, global resource space, it is not recommended to create, delete, or configure buckets on the high availability code path of your application. It's better to create, delete, or configure buckets in a separate initialization or setup routine that you run less often.

Bucket naming and automatically created buckets

If your application automatically creates buckets, choose a bucket naming scheme that is unlikely to cause naming conflicts. Ensure that your application logic will choose a different bucket name if a bucket name is already taken.

For more information about bucket naming, see Bucket naming rules.