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.

Tool for converting video formats

I just found a great little online site that converts FLV files to MPEG and MOV formats along with a host of others.

Just download a YouTube file using a site like www.savetube.com and then convert the file using Media Convert. Save Tube is also a site where you can backup any of the videos you have uploaded to You Tube or any other video site.

You’ll have to upload it but I found the upload and resulting download (of the new file) both went quite quickly and the resulting file quality is quite good — at least for MOV files. And because it is online, no software to install.