Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an easy and inexpensive Internet hard-drive from Amazon Web Services (AWS) with absolutely no limits.
Now some people assume that Amazon S3 is a storage service meant primarily for web start-ups who store data in-the-cloud but that’s not correct because just about anyone (home users included) can benefit from S3.
For instance, you may backup your large music collection or even your entire computer hard-drive on S3. Similarly, bloggers can use Amazon S3 to store web images without worrying too much about their bandwidth bills.
If you never had a chance to explore Amazon S3 before, read the following guide that makes S3 simple even for non-geeks. It has all the information and tools you would need to quickly get started with Amazon S3.
The Basic Requirements:
To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll need an Amazon account (yes, it’s free; you pay only if you buy something from them) and an Amazon AWS S3 account.
Now go to AWS Access Key Identifiers and generate a unique Access Key ID + Secret Access Key pair that is required for using Amazon S3.
Upload & Manage Files on Amazon S3
Now that you have all the basic things in place, it’s time to explore tools uploading and managing files on Amazon S3.
Amazon S3Fox - Perhaps the simplest of all, this Firefox add-on provides an FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3. This is recommended if you are uploading a small batch of files as S3Fox may have issues with long queues.
S3 Backup (Windows) - This is a free and simple tool for uploading or downloading files from S3 - just pick a file or a folder on the local hard drive to put it to S3. You can even set batch file attributes to bunch of files or folders.
Transmit (Mac): Transmit for Mac is a popular FTP client for Mac OS X that sells for around $30 but the tool may be worth every penny - it lets you upload, download and manage your online Amazon S3 storage like a native Mac app.
Jungle Disk - This is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and there’s also a portable version for your USB computer. Jungle Disk will set you back by $20 per license but that includes all three platforms and they also provide a web interface to manage your files on S3.
Jungle Disk has a useful “Automatic Backup” features that will backup files and folders from your local hard drive onto Amazon S3 automatically. Thus it can be used as a decent alternative to online backup services like Mozy, Carbonite, etc.
Note: There really isn’t a thing called ‘folders’ per se on the S3 but that is the topic of another day. For now, just assume that you can create ‘folders’ and have files inside them.
WordPress plugin - This comes handy if you to stores files on Amazon S3 rather than using the default “uploads folder” of WordPress.
Once the WordPress S3 plugin is installed and activated, you’ll see an extra icon (storage cylinder) in your “Add Media” Bar. This will allow you to upload files to your Amazon S3 account and can be used inside the Wordpress interface.
Read Part II - Amazon S3 Buckets Described in Plain English
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/amazon-s3-simple-storage-service-guide/3889/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Amazon looking for a lot through online
Hey, nice post about Amazon S3. I been using it for some of my sites and it has been really useful.
Written by Yak on 07.16.08
I see this Pricing Structure on Amazon…how is it free?
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Pricing
Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.
We charge less where our costs are less, thus some prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the location of the bucket.
United States
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
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, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests
Written by VG on 07.16.08
Can we host a website from this space?
I am exploring to host quite a few websites ranging from light to very heave one. Some web service include heavy data storage and that needs web and database technology use too.
Like i will need to use Php, Mysql etc there.
Is this possible?
@bhupendra,
Ofcourse you can ! I gave a recent class presentation on cloud computing and I love this technology.
I want to host one dotnet application with sql server 2005 database.Does it support all features required for hosting a DOTNET(framework 2.0) application.
Written by Tanmaya on 07.22.08
Thanx for sharing this — I’m looking for better, more elegant S3 uploader tools for Windows. I think Transmit is wonderful but it’s too bad it doesn’t exist on the PC side, because I’m using S3Fox and finding its quirks unappealing. Straightforward to use, but numerous problems: e.g., can’t resize the window, I got strange errors when uploading files with apostrophes in them (altho that worked before for me), can’t batch-change ACLs by Shift-clicking multiple files, etc.
Hello all. I still don’t understand the meaning of data transfer in and data transfer out. I’ll give a case and I appreciate anyone to calculate the final cost:
In July 1, I uploaded a huge streaming video of size 10 GB from my computer to S3. During this month, 10,000 users from the entire world have watched my video. What would be the total cost at the end of month July?
Written by Ali on 08.20.08