Marketing No Brainers

Make Amazon S3 Painless With EZS3

October 9th, 2008Audio and Video

Amazon S3 is a data hosting service provided by that web retailing giant, Amazon. If you have lots of large files to store or deliver, it is extrememly cost-effective. S3 is free to join, and is a pay as you go service. S3 offers datacenters in both Europe and the USA, and prices are dependent on your location.

If you have hesitated to use audio or video in your marketing process due to server limitations, with S3 you can remove those limits. A typical web host might allow you a gigabyte of storage and 5 or so gigabytes of transfer on a shared server. And you’d pay around eight to ten bucks a month for that. Hosting just a few videos could eat up a major portion of your allotment, and if a hundred people viewed your 50 megabyte video, you’d be out of transfer for the month.

If you are a USA customer (rates in Europe are just slightly higher,) on S3 you could store 10 gigabytes of audios, videos, any kind of file really for $1.50 a month. It will cost you $1.00 to transfer it in. 10 Gigabytes of views or listens of a 50 MB file (200 views or downloads) will run you about $2.00. So for less than five bucks a month you can host all those and NOT use any of your existing web hosting resources.

Amazon guarantees 99.99% uptime. The guarantee is right in their service level agreement. Using S3, you’ll have a no limits, scalable, and reliable data hosting service for peanuts. Let’s say you transfer 100 gigabytes out in a month. You have 10 gigabytes stored. You’ll pay Amazon less than $20 for this.

But there is a downside. The downside is interfacing into S3 for file transfer, both up and down, and making media players for your content. Thankfully there is a no-brainer solution, EZS3. This is an affordable monthly membership service that offers a very easy to use interface for the S3 service. You can start a two week trial at EZS3 for just a dollar, after your trial a single user account is just $20 a month. Of course you’ll need to have an S3 account as well.

With S3 and EZS3 you’ll no longer need to consider moving up to a dedicated server just because you need the storage and bandwidth to host your media files. You can continue to use a reliable shared hosting provider for your website html or php and then deliver your audio/video media with through EZS3. Using our example above, your monthly cost would be around $42 plus the cost of your shared hosting. Contrast this with a dedicated server at around $175 a month and you’ll see the advantage to going the S3 route.