Storage solutions – Amazon web service and S3Stats

I have started going into multi media.  There is the Landlord Law Podcasts and the Landlord Law YouTube channel.  Exciting stuff.  And I am planning to do more audios and videos, both promotional and in due course as part of the content of my membership site.

However these mulitmedia files are very big.  I was shocked when I saw how large my audio files were, and found out that they tend to be about a MB a minute.  There is the problem about loading them up to blogs and sites in the first place, and then the strain that they can place on your server.  Particuarly if lots of people  want to use them at the same.

The answer to this it seems is Amazon.  I always thought of Amazon as primarily an online bookshop, even though they have branched out into all sorts of other things, even shoes and garden furniture.  I have been a fan of Amazon for many years.

However they also provide online storage space, under the name Amazon Web Services.  It seems that it is both very cheap and very secure and reliable.   If you are not a died in the wool techie its all a bit confusing, but I now feel reasonably confident with their simple storage solution Amazon S3.

You have to sign up, although if you have an ordinary Amazon account you use the same login etc.  When in the S3 area you have to set up buckets to store things in.  Then in the buckets you can put more folders to sort things and then load up your files.  Bingo!  You can link to them easily on your blog (so long as you remember to tell Amazon that they are public files).

I did this a week or so, loading up my podcast audio files and various other things.  I felt pretty pleased with myself until I realised that there was no way I could track how many people downloaded and listened to or watched my files!

I had a rummage around on Amazon itself and found that you could activate something called logging which would record details.  Yippee! I thought, sorted, and duly activated.  However a couple of days later I found the folders full of all these logs, which I did not know what to do with or understand.  Surely there must be an answer?

There is, and its name is S3Stat.  You sign up with them, set up some keys which let them access your Amazon S3 storage area, and then they get busy and start analyzing them.  So finally I was able to learn that in the 24 hours since I signed up, six people had downloaded my podcast (its now gone up a bit)!

Its a pretty good service at a minuscule price, $5 per month (about £3).  However they also have a ‘Cheap Bastard’ plan which allows you to have the service for free if only you write about them online.

Hence of course this article!  Its a pretty good service.  You might want to check it out.