How to Set Up Amazon S3 and FireFox S3 Organizer

One website hosting company won't allow you to store videos on your hosting account. Another hosting provider sets a security guard and asks that you don't store images on your own site. What do you do?

The advantage of placing video files on S3 storage is that doing so means those video files consume no space or bandwidth from your web host account - when you display those videos on your site.

This is good if you have a lot of visitors and don't want to exceed the storage or bandwidth limitations set by your web host.

Here is some info from Amazon:
Amazon S3 was built to fulfill the following design requirements:

* Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.

* Reliable: Store data durably, with 99.99% availability. There can be no single points of failure. All failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime.

* Fast: Amazon S3 must be fast enough to support high-performance applications. Server-side latency must be insignificant relative to Internet latency. Any performance bottlenecks can be fixed by simply adding nodes to the system.

* Inexpensive: Amazon S3 is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components. As a result, frequent node failure is the norm and must not affect the overall system. It must be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs.

* Simple: Building highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive storage is difficult. Doing so in a way that makes it easy to use for any application anywhere is more difficult. Amazon S3 must do both.

Q: How reliable is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 was built to the same service level standards that Amazon requires for its own web sites, with a targeted 99.99% availability, and storage of each piece of data on multiple servers in multiple Amazon datacenters.

Q: What happens if traffic from my application suddenly spikes?

Amazon S3 was designed from the ground up to handle traffic for any Internet application. Pay-as-you-go pricing and unlimited capacity ensures that your incremental costs dont change and that your service is not interrupted. Amazon S3's massive scale enables us to spread load evenly, so that no individual application is affected by traffic spikes.

CURRENT PRICING

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer "in" and "out" refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead.

You can read more about the service here

Buck Anderson is the President and CEO of Jive Media Group LLC. His expertise in web development and Internet Marketing began in 1997 as senior web developer for a muiti-million dollar company in Central Minnesota. He is an accomplished trainer and consultant for the popular, open source content management systems, DotNetNuke and Magento eCommerce. Buck is recognized throughout the industry as DNN Professor. He is also a respected XMod MVP accomplished in landing pages, forms and database designs.

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