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Need Better, Cheaper Storage Solution for Video?
Amazon S3 could be just want you need. Amazon and many other large companies like Twitter and SmugMug also use S3.
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. It’s an unlimited storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Here are some of the things you could do with S3: store videos or other media files, backup files or drives from your computer, host your web site. And since there’s a maximum individual file size of 5GB, you could even distribute an independent film. If your film takes off like “Paranormal Activity,” the $15,000 horror film that has grossed $84 million, Amazon S3 is scalable so the additional traffic will not crash the server.
It’s very inexpensive. Amazon charges 15 cents per gigabyte per month, with additional charges for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data, and a per-request (get or put) charge. When you visit the web site, http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ you may find it a bit daunting for us mere mortals, but it can be easy to use if you use a Firefox Add-On called Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer.
First you’ll have to get the Firefox browser from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox Install the browser. You’ll be glad you did. I would never go back to Microsoft IE. Then get the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer Add-On at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247 After you’ve installed this add-on in Firefox, you will find the “S3 Organizer” listed in the Tools pulldown of Firefox.
Unlike other storage services, at Amazon S3 you pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee and no set-up fees. Try it. You’ll like it.
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When you rent a server, the charges are more like 1 cent per gigabyte… so that’s drastically cheaper than just using Amazon S3 blindly…
Comment by Julian — January 25, 2012 @ 6:01 am