Hosting Lots of Videos on your Site? Amazon S3 Could be the Answer
If you’re hosting large amounts of video on your site, which requires large amounts of bandwidth, then you should really check out Amazon S3 as an option for your online storage.
Amazon S3 allows you to upload any type of file to their servers, which you can then call to your site and add to your pages as you wish.
Over the passed couple of weeks, I’ve had numerous clients ring up for help with uploading their content to Amazon S3 and adding it to their pages. One such client told me he currently had 51 videos uploaded to S3, that were relatively good quality for web viewing. He’d just received his first invoice from Amazon for the storage he’d used, which came to a grand total of … $0.17. Hardly going to break the bank.
Currently, the easiest way to upload content to S3 is using the S3 Organizer plug-in for Firefox, which opens what is effectively an FTP client in your internet browser, so you can drag and drop files from your local PC, into your account at Amazon.
Perry Lawrence over at AskMrVideo has created a great screencast tutorial on how to sign up for an account at Amazon S3, how to install the Firefox plug-in, and how to link the two so that you can easily start uploading your files.
The great thing about Amazon S3, is that the storage and bandwidth is on a pay-as-you-use system, meaning your never pay more than you actually require. With standard hosting plans, you pay for a set amount of storage and bandwidth per month. If you stay within these limits, then it’s not a problem. If however you go over the limit, you start getting hit with massive bills, or run the risk of your site being shut down. With Amazon S3, this is simply not a problem.
So … if you have lots of video content on your site, you should really check out S3 … it could save you lots of money.