s3 – The Codebelay Blog

3 Clients for Storing Data into Amazon S3

It’s not that difficult to store data into your Amazon S3 account and share that data with 50,000 or so people on the cheap.

Armed with just your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, you can use these two cool storage clients.

S3 Webmaster

For Windows, you can download the S3 Webmaster for free, and you just simply drag and drop your files and S3 will automatically set the permissions for public download.

S3Hub

For Macs, there is S3Hub, which works whether or not you have an S3 account. If you don’t have an S3 account you can view other public S3 buckets. If you do have an account you can easily upload and share the assets you stored.

Transmit

If your data storage needs run the gamut from sftp, webdav, iDisk, automated upload workflows, and S3, you’ll want to plunk down some cash like I did and get Transmit. At $17.95 it’s a bargain. I use it’s webdav and S3 features almost daily.

Amazon’s EC2 and S3 — Computing on the Cheap

I was really inspired by the story of Pownce., and how they used S3 for storing media assets.

I really liked how easy it was to share media with Pownce. Alas, it’s no more and shut down on December 15th of last year.

What’s a guy to do? Well, using a combination of Transmit, a file upload and synchronization client, and S3 I can hack my own file sharing. I just upload the files I want to share and send the links to friends.

Here’s a link to an S3 media asset.

Once I felt comfortable about S3, I took the dive into EC2.

Pros: You can have a server of your choice, in my case LAMP, running in less than 5 minutes.

Cons: If the server crashes, all your data is gone.

Solution: Use ESB for database storage and S3 to back up files and custom executables.

How much does it cost?

For 1 LAMP server with 1.7GiB RAM running with a virtual 1.7Ghz CPU, and about 160GiB of storage will run you about 10 cents an hour, which is not bad considering that a colo will charge you around $100 per 1U or 12.5 cents per hour, and you’re stuck with the hardware you have.

The savings are even greater if you’re just setting up servers for prototyping and tearing them down. My last EC2 bills averaged at about $35 per month.

The next few blog posts will go into more detail about how to set up your own EC2 virtual server, and the pitfalls I’ve run into.