In order to save me some trouble from my hosting provider, I recently decided to move all my multimedia content to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.
Scalable and affordable serving of large files to an expanding number of visitors indeed has become a commodity, as a GB of storage per month costs only $0.15, with $0.18 per GB for the first TB of transfered data (check all the prices here).
What you need for a simple start is:
- Sign up for Amazon Web Services (link)
- Under Your web services account, you will find you AWS Access Identifiers
- Save your Access Key ID (public) and your secret access key somewhere safe
- Get a tool like Bucket Explorer, which servers as a UI for S3 (buckets are like folders in S3)
- Sign in with your keys
- Start uploading content and setting access rights
Once you’ve given read access for All users to a file within a bucket, it will become available from a web browser/service at such an address:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name/file_name.extension
