No Comments Written by Andrew Bonar on November 3, 2008 – 6:31 am

Unless you have been hiding under a stone recently you must have heard of the Amazon S3 simple file hosting service. You can use it store any amount of data online. It makes truly scalable computing available to the masses. No one can compete with Amazon’s network cluster and Service Level Guarantee at anywhere close to the price Amazon charges.

If you host downloads of any kind you should be looking at Amazon. Whether its music, large numbers of images, video, audio or documents, zip files and PDF files. Any file from 1byte in size to 5GB can be stored on Amazon web services. There is even a BitTorrent™ protocol interface which will dramatically reduce your costs for high-scale distribution.

It is cost-effective with hosting at 15cents per GB for storage and 17 cents per gigabyte for downloads it is hard for traditional webhosts to compete. If they can compete you should be asking yourself, how? It is most likely at the detriment of service quality. Amazon S3 does not replace your webhost though. It cannot host your database or CMS system for example, your online shopping script or contact-us form. You supplement your traditional webhosting  with Amazons S3 service, a pay only for what you use srvice, as you use it, with no up-front commitments.

Amazon S3 is intentionally designed to be ultra simple, essentially its an interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. There are mechanisms for securing your files, and if you are tech inclined, the whole system is SOAP compliant.

One of the massive benefits of using Amazon is it is truly “battle-tested” and can hande whatever you throw at it. With no pre-commitment and a pay-as-you-go structure (you pay only for what you use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments) it is ideally placed to handle your spikes in traffic, no matter how big they might be. This is reliability on a truly massive scale, Amazon style networks do not come cheap they have spent over $2 Billion in 10 years. Its akin to having your data managed by some of the finest minds on the internet hosted on one of the worlds most resilient and complex self healing networks in the world.

Now you might be saying to yourself, this sounds great as a backup utility for my desktop pc, laptop or external hard drive. You would be right. Their is an application that makes this easy:
JungleDisk http://jungledisk.com/ It turns Amazon S3 into a virtual drive on your computer.
JungleDisk is no good for hosting your websites files, as files uploaded to your virtual drive are not HTTP accessible.

So how do you get started with S3 for webhosting?

1. Signup for an account (its free but you will need a credit card):
   http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
2. When you sign up, you get two codes: an access key ID and secret access key.
   Keep a note of these you will need them
3. You will need to create an S3 “bucket” before you do anything else. The Amazon ‘bucket’ is akin to a folder on your webserver. Its essentially a way to organise your media.
4. Now you can upload your files*
5. Point your webpages and templates to the Amazon S3 URL’s.

* OK, unless you are comfortable with programming (SOAP, Python etc) you will need to use an external application. Amazon does not make it easy. However there are a couple of applications out there that can make it easy. Most require you to follow the steps 1-3 only, then the application takes over.

My personal favourite is a little extension for Mozilla Firefox:
http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php

I have tested it and it works very well, with a drag and drop interface that I really like. Another cool tool with more advanced features (but a price tag after the free trial) is:
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/ Bucket Explorer.

Their is a lot more that can be said of the S3 service, basically we have covered the fact that it is extremely cheap, therefore saving you money, which you can spend making your site more stylish. That it is scalable, and that it is far more reliable than some budget priced webhost, extra 25,000 one hour? Just the once, NO problem!

With the links to the tools we have shown you the simple ways to upload and manage your files. If there is feedback I will be happy to answer any questions or write another article covering something in more depth.