Amazon S3 for Beginners
Amazon S3 for Beginners Introduction
Hello and welcome to the S3 Hosting For Beginners Video Course. You’ve made a smart choice on the siding to get access to this course so that you can begin to setup your Amazon S3 account and begin to upload big video files, audio files or even images, or any file that you want to upload to your account and save a lot of money. So my goal and the purpose of this video course is to get you to that point. So I am going to keep this simple, straightforward and to the point.
So first things first what I want to do now is give you a quick overview of the video course so you know exactly what to expect. In that way you will see the step by step process and you will be able to implement it at a faster rate. So obviously this is Video #1 which is the 1introduction and Quick Overview.
Setting Up Your Amazon S3 Account
Video #2, I am going to talk about Calculating Your Costs. It’s good to have an idea of your numbers and potential budgeting so you that you can kind of put money aside for your monthly and yearly budget. Now I will say with Amazon S3 you are going to save a lot of money. In fact when we took the move from a dedicated $300 per month server to Amazon S3, we now pay about $30 a month and we are utilizing a good amount of bandwidth, which you will see more in Video #2, which is going to be an eye opening experience.
So in Video #3 we are going to talk about What You Need. So there are few things you need before you can get started.
Video #4, we will talk about the Recommended Softwares and Why.
Video #5, we will Connect to S3, utilizing those softwares.
We will create Buckets and Folders in Video #6.
Video #7 is going to be about protecting your Amazon bucket by Preventing Unauthorized Access. So a lot of people are unaware of this but they create an Amazon bucket, they set everything up on their download page and people begin to download the files. That’s great in all but people forget to protect the bucket, so what ends up happening is people share those links. Or they put it on their own site and then guess what, they are utilizing the bandwidth that you have to pay for. So this is a very important step and I am going to show you how to do it right.
Understanding Storage Classes in Amazon S3
Video #8, we are going to talk about Transferring Files from the PC or your Mac to your Amazon S3 account.
And of course last but not least, Video #9, we are going to talk about Getting the URL to Each File. So this is crucial, especially when you begin to build out your download pages. You need to have the direct link, right?
So what I want to do right now is just to create a flow chart so that you can visually see what is happening as far as integrating your existing web hosting account with Amazon S3. So I want to make sure that you understand that you are not replacing your web hosting account, but rather what you can do is you can size it down while using Amazon S3.
Best Practices for Using Amazon S3
How Amazon S3 Helps You Scale Without Upgrading Your Web Hosting
So right now you have a web hosting account, right? And some of you could be paying $10, $20 a month, you could have your virtual private server and you could be paying a $130 a month. Or you could have your dedicated server and eventually hit that $200 to $300 per month. Now by using Amazon S3, what it does is it alleviates the burden of having to host tons of heavy duty files, like video files, audio files and images. So what ends up happening is yes, your web hosting account works now and you could be paying a low fee, but overtime what’s going to happen is, as your company grows or as your website grows you will get more and more visitors, right? So the more visitors you get the heavier of the burden it has on that particular webhosting account or server. And then what will happen is the web hosting company just ask you to, they will say something like well you are maxing out your account so you are going to need to upgrade to the next level, the next level and ultimately you are going to find yourself paying for a dedicated server.
Using Amazon S3 for Scalable Storage
Now what Amazon S3 allows you to do is, is allows you to grow on a long term basis without having that burden. So you can essentially get a cheap virtual private server for $25 and host your domain here. And then place all the images, videos, audio files or just big files that people are going to download or utilize your bandwidth. And you can place some on the Amazon S3 account.
So what that does is it alleviates you from having to actually step up to the next level, to the next level, and so forth. So actually what happened was we had a dedicated server and we actually moved down to a cheap $50 per month virtual private server. So now what we do is we use that as a virtual private server, meaning that what other people do does not impact out actual account.
Uploading Files to Amazon S3
So now we have a cheap web hosting account and we link the images, the videos, the audio and the big files over here because with Amazon, what’s nice about this is you could have thousands of people per day accessing the Amazon S3 servers and it’s not going to faze them, it’s not going to crash your account or anything. The people that are visiting here, they are going to just go to your basic yourdomain.com, they might be visiting your WordPress site, but all the images and videos and everything are over here. Now you could put the images here and just stick the big videos, audios or big files over here.
That’s something that we did during product launches for example, is we found that a spike of traffic can crash your whole server. By placing, before Amazon S3 was available, we would place the images, videos, audios and big files on a different server, and that’s how we would combat this whole situation.
Amazon S3 for Beginners Conclusion
So I just want to make that clear, that you understand that this doesn’t necessarily replace this. You still have the web hosting account, you still have WordPress on this account, you can still have images, but the whole goal is to alleviate that burden, alright?
So now that you understand how it works let’s move on to the next videos and I am going to show you how to actually get this done.
So with that said, let’s just jump straight in and go into Video #2 and we will talk about Calculating Your Costs, so you know exactly what to put aside as far as your budget.
