A Beginners Guide to Using Amazon S3

Do you wish you had an inexpensive way to host all your images, MP3s, Videos, PDF files? Or even just a simple solution to back up all your computer files without worrying about how much space you have left on your hard drive? Then Amazon S3, a remote file hosting service from the same people that sell you books, could be the solution you have been looking for.

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 stands for Amazon Simple Storage Service and it does exactly as it says, it stores data on it’s servers in order to minimize the data held on your website server or  computer which keeps bandwidth costs down and offers a great way to back up all the files from your computer.

Many websites, big and small are using the services of Amazon to host their images, ebooks, video files, and audio files.  And many individuals are using the reliability of Amazon S3 as a way to backup and share all their personal files from their computer.  The reliability of Amazon S3 is second to none, and the cost makes the service attractive to everyone from bloggers to large corporations.

A really quick guide to hosting, servers and bandwidth

For all the non-technical people out there your website is held on a server, which is like the hard drive on a computer. So all your files for the website are held on a server owned by your hosting company. However, you will have limited space depending on your hosting company.

Your hosting company is the company you pay money to keep your website’s files. You host your website files on their server and they charge you a monthly or yearly fee. The only problem with this is that the server your website files are on will more than likely be shared with other website’s, this is what is known as a shared server. You pay a premium for dedicated servers and you have to manage and configure this yourself, which can be very time consuming if you don’t know what you are doing.

So, with the limited space and limited amount of bandwidth you can use, if your site or blog becomes big, you will quickly find your images, videos, pdf, and zip files all clog up your bandwidth allowance. If you hit the front page of a major social media site as Digg.com Delicious.com or Stumbleupon.com your server could literally crash and be down for hours.

A Word About Servers

There are different types of servers, or hosting, you can use to host your website on, and depending on your level of skill, and willingness to learn, will determine which one you go for:

Shared Hosting: Your website will be placed on a server along with other websites, which could range from a few to a few thousand.  Your hosting company controls it and you get access to a vast range of services it can provide such as one click wordpress install.

Reseller Hosting: You can, if you wish, start a hosting company of your own by becoming a reseller.  This means your hosting company manages the servers and you deal with all enquiries from your own clients. Again you would sell hosting and there would be multiple websites on one server.

Virtual Dedicated Hosting: Also known as Virtual Private Server (VPS).  This divides a server into many virtual servers where each virtual server has it’s own resources without affecting the other. Depending on your host, you may need to manage your own VPS.

Dedicated Hosting: You would get your own server, which would be stored at the hosting company building.  The user has full administrative access to the box, which means you are responsible for the security and maintenance of your own dedicated box.

Managed Hosting: You would get your own server, however you would not get full control of it, this would be done by a team from your hosting company.

These are the four main types of hosting used however there are more such as cloud hosting, clustered hosting, grid hosting and of course having your own physical server at home.

If you have a small website, which will not have a huge amoount of traffic going to it, then shared hosting maybe the answer for you.  If you expect your site to grow and get a lot of traffic then you could look into one of the other three options, again this will depend on your level of technical ability and the price you are willing to pay.

A Word About Bandwidth

Your hosting company will give you a figure for your monthly bandwidth allowance and will be measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB).

The amount of bandwidth you need will depend on how you intend to use your website. If you are just hosting web pages and have a few pages, then there will be no need to worry about bandwidth allowance. However if you use it for people to listen to and download MP3 files or watch videos your bandwidth allowance will quickly be consumed and your hosting company may start to charge you for the extra bandwidth you have used.

For example, say you have three different website’s:

Website 1 has only got 10 web pages on it with a few images. Each page is around 50 kilobytes (KB).

Website 2 has got around 100 mp3 files for users to download, plus over 100 web pages. Each MP3 file is 5 (MB) and each page, not including the MP3 files is around 50 KB.

Website 3 has a mixture of web pages, MP3s and Videos. the MP3s are around 5MB, and the video files are around 60MB.

Comparison of data storage and different files types

So you would use the same amount of bandwidth to download one MP3 audio file as you would to view one hundred web pages (50Kb) of your site.

Or, you would use the same amount of bandwidth to download one video file as you would to download 12 MP3 files or view 1,200 web pages.

As you can see it depends greatly on what you are using your website for as to how much bandwidth you will need.

Backup Your Computer Files

As mentioned previously you can use Amazon S3 to backup and share all your computer files.  The beauty of having an online storage system for your computer files means you will be able to access them from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.  You can share photos, videos, important documents and all your mp3 files ready for download with a few clicks of the mouse.

Welcome Amazon S3

If you have a hard time thinking in terms of data and storage think about it this way;

When you are moving home you have lots of furniture  and boxes to store somewhere (data) but you cannot keep it in your own house (your server) you have to rent a storage place (Amazon S3) to hold all your furniture and boxes.  So you are literally renting space from Amazon to host your files.

Now that you can mentally get a picture of what Amazon S3 is about lets take a look at pricing and see how to set Amazon S3 up.

Prices

As you will see from the prices below Amazon S3 is extremely competitive.  You basically pay a set amount per GB to store your files and are charged a set amount per download.  As an example, if you were to store the full contents of your computer harddrive and it was 100GB you would be charged $15 and $0.01 cent every time you requested a file from storage.

Storage

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Data Transfer

• $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in
• $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests

• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Amazon S3 is not costly however it is still wise to check out their prices before signing up for the service.

Check out Amazon S3′s prices here.

You can also estimate how much you will get charged using their simple calculator here.

The next page will talk more about using Amazon S3. Go to the Next Page ->

Related Posts:

1. Are Offsite Data Backups Really Neccesary ?
2. Best Password Practices Guide
3. Choosing the Right Web Host

Pages: 1 2