Using Amazon S3 for hosting media files

What is Amazon S3?

AmazonS3 is an innovative, developer-oriented Simple Storage Service with extremely low prices.

This is how it has been described: “Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.”

You are billed monthly based on the bandwidth used – $0.15 per GB stored, $0.10 per GB transferred monthly. This is a great alternative if you are paying hefty monthly Hosting fees to store video files which are not used very much monthly.

What can you store on S3:

* Audio files
* Media files
* Podcast files
* photos
* Backup you hard drive

Why should you use S3:

* Amazon S3 is cheap.
* It’s scalable – use as much or as little storage and bandwidth as you want.
* Easy to use with the Firefox addon interface – see below.
* Everyone can use S3 – while it was built for developers, it is now widely used by anyone who needs a secure and simple Hosting solution.
* Your data is safe as S3 is an Amazon service. Amazon is also a brand name that people recognise so it can add kudo’s to your content.
* S3 is more reliable than a homebuilt server or cheap web Hosting account.

How to use Amazon S3

1. You need to go and set up an account at Amazon Web Services.
2. Then you need to download this free Firefox Addon, which looks like an FTP screen, which helps you manage your file transfers. This is better than other paid tools out there that do the same job.

Essential Wordpress Plugin to protect your media files.

If you do use Amazon S3 to host information that you sell either as an online course or for a membership site, you need to think about protecting this IP. One way that I have found to do this so far is to use this clever Wordpress plugin: S3FlowShield. This plugin encrypts the files and paths of files stored on AmazonS3.

If you want to learn more about using AmazonS3 and how to protect your media files from being downloaded illegally, here is a free webinar on S3FlowShield.

How to prevent content spam

If you have a blog, you know that you will get lots of people making comments on your posts with links back to all sorts of unsavory pharmaceuticals which usually have nothing to do with the topic of that post or your blog.

The main reason they are doing this is to create back links to their sites for SEO.

To discourage content spam as this practice is called, Google came up with the rel=”nofollow” tag. It is detailed in their post about content spam.

You add this to any links to tell the google bots not to pass any link juice to those links. Eventually, you will discourage this practice. Time will tell.

If you want to find out which links are followed or no followed on a page, you should get the very useful add on for firefox called “Seo for firefox” which will color all no follow links red on the page. If you have never done this before, try it out. But first you will need to use a firefox browser.

If your blog is built on wordpress, just install the amazing akismet plugin which will act like a spam filter and filters out all comments with the most common spam phrases. Every blog needs this.

How to add life and fun to your blog posts

I came across this great tool Zemanta via a post on Twitter and is also featured on TechCrunch. It allows you to find contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags from the net that you can add to a Wordpress blog post you are writing with one click. Zemanta uses an internally developed semantic analysis engine and will only suggest Creative Commons content so there are no issues with legality of using the content on your site.

Currently it is works with Firefox and TypePad, self hosted Wordpress, wordpress.com and Blogger blogs although they are looking at adding Movable type and also LiveWriter to the mix.

I have been testing it on some of my blogs and so far it has been great for adding some color to my posts with image suggestions and also the automatic tagging is my favorite feature of this. You can download Zemanta for free now. It was a winning startup idea at Seedcamp and has just raised more funding this year so I am looking forward to seeing what other great functions they come up with. This has made blogging much more fun.

Turning off no follow on comments with Linky Love plugin

I was reading Tinu’s traffic tips blog and saw that she was using this plugin on her blog posts. It is called Linky Love and it lets you automatically follow the links in comments after the person has made a minimum number of comments. This will prevent human spammers and also comment spammers who put in SEO names like “cashmere dog sweaters”. Quite an interesting concept. I will give it a trial once I work out how to fix the settings. Well worth trying out and it is nice to be able to give some link love to those real readers of your blog.

WP Cats plugin makes editing categories easy

I have added some new categories to one of my blogs and was finding it a real painto go though all the posts one by one to edit the category. Then I found this plugin in which lets you change the categories of posts in bulk. It is called WP-Cats and it is a godsend. I don’t have to spend all night doing this now.

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