Before providing multi-media services to your web users, you must ensure that your web site hosting solution can support the increased demand for online storage and bandwidth.  Common solution is to use a different server to host media files like images, videos, and audio files. This distributes the traffic and bandwidth load between hosts and allows the primary web server to maintain good response time by  focus on delivering web pages and server-side processing, rather than serving up large audio, images  and  much larger videos.

However, it  can prove to be quite expensive as you have to  set up, configure, and maintain  extra servers just for hosting your media files. In addition you have the following questions to worry about:

• How much traffic will this setup accommodate? What happens if I get more traffic than it can handle?
• What happens if the host goes down?
• How do I backup the files so they’re not lost?
• How much am I paying for idle capacity?

So, what do you do?  The answer is – use the Amazon S3 web services. Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet and gives any subscriber access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

The pricing for Amazon S3 is on a pay-as-you-go basis, so there is no minimum fee. This means you don’t have to invest in a large amount of hosting infrastructure or services in order to ensure that your web site handles the occasional traffic spike.

To estimate how much this solution will cost you per month, you can use the online calculator which you can find in the site knowledgebase. Click HERE to calculate your monthly cost and follow the steps below to implement the solution.

Implementation is very simple – just follow the steps in this tutorial or watch the embedded video:

Step 1: Sign Up for Amazon S3

Sign up for Amazon S3 at http://aws.amazon.com/s3 .

If you have used Amazon before , you can sign in with your existing account:

After clicking next, you will have to confirm your contact information and accept AWS Customer Agreement.

The next step is to select the payment method. All major credit cards are accepted, and  if you have shopped with Amazon.com before, you can accept to use the credit card Amazon already has on record:

On the next step you have the option to select Silver or Gold support plan.

Clicking on "Learn More" will show the details on the snapshot below:

 

 

Clicking on "Complete Sign Up" completes the process.

 

You will recieve 2 emails:

"Welcome to Amazon Web Services" and  "Amazon Simple Storage Service Sign-Up Confirmation" which will contain the url

http://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html?action=access-key

which you must use to access your account and retrieve your two access identifiers needed for uploading your media files:

• Access Key ID
• Secret Access Key

The Access Key ID is a public identifier, like a user name, that specifies a particular Amazon S3 account. The Secret Access Key is the private identifier, like a password, that ensures you’re the one making a request.

Important:

Your Secret Access Key is a secret, and should be known only by you and AWS. You should never e-mail your Secret Access Key to anyone. It is important to keep your Secret Access Key confidential to protect your account.

 

On this page, in addition, you can alos choose to enable Multi-Factor Authentication as demonstrated on the snapshot below. To enable this, you will need an additional hardware device from a third party. Currently  such devices can only be shipped to the United States.

Step 2: Upload your media files

Without going into too many details, Amazon S3 uses concepts of a bucket and object to store data. Buckets help organize a collection of objects, like how a folder might contain a list of files.

Step 2.1 Install and  Configure your upload software

There are many tools available for working with Amazon S3 without having to write a software application.

We recommend CLOUDBERRY S3 EXPLORER FREEWARE

Click HERE for a  quick and easy installation guide.

Step 2.2 Create a bucket

First, create a bucket in your Amazon S3 account that corresponds to the domain you’ll use to host your media files. For our web site, we’ll create a bucket called, “media.tipsmarket.com”.

Important: Use lower-case letters only to name buckets that will be used in DNS redirects. This requirement is a function of the way that DNS handles names (always lower case).

Why use this specific bucket name? Amazon S3 has a virtual hosting feature that allows inbound requests from a web site, so it will serve up content from the bucket by the same name. We’ll talk more about this feature in the next section when we configure our domain.

 

To create a bucket using Cloudberry S3 Explorer, click on the New Bucket button as indicated on the snapshot below:

Specify bucket name and location and click OK

 

Right-click on the new bucket and select "Properties".

Configure bucket as required. Amazon S3 has a rich set of access privileges for both buckets and objects, so make sure that permissions are set on both the bucket and your objects to allow everyone access

 

Step 2.3 Upload Files

Upload your media files to the new bucket in Amazon S3.

Uploading is very simple. Just drag files from your local folders to the amazon bucket. Files will be queued to be uploaded in the background.

Step 2.4 Test access to your files

All the media files are now accessible through a URL that points to Amazon S3. The basic URL syntax for S3 is http://.s3.amazonaws.com/

http://media.tipsmarket.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio06.mp3

http://media.tipsmarket.com.s3.amazonaws.com/video06.mp4

http://media.tipsmarket.com.s3.amazonaws.com/webimage.jpg

The simplest way to use Amazon S3 for media hosting is to simply update our web pages to point to these files.

 

Step 3. Setup your Domain

When people download our files, we want them to look like they’re coming from our domain, and not s3.amazonaws.com. If someone chooses to download our audio file, we want users to think it’s coming from our site. We’ll now set up our domain hosting so that the files are available through a URL under http://media.tipsmarket.com/.

Since we already host our web site on www.tipsmarket.com, we now want to create a sub-domain that we’ll point to the files located in Amazon S3. This is done by using a CNAME entry on our hosting provider.

Most popular web hosting companies will let you create a new CNAME record for your domain. For our hosting company, creating a new CNAME record consisted of logging into our account, then navigating through a few DNS configuration pages until we ended up at one that allows us to create a CNAME record.

To create the CNAME record, we specify an alias, “media”, and the domain it points to, “media.tipsmarket.com.s3.amazonaws.com”.

Now, with the CNAME record in place, the media files are now available through the following URLs:

http://media.tipsmarket.com/video06.mp4

http://media.tipsmarket.com/audio06.mp3

http://media.tipsmarket.com/webimage.jpg

Our web page can now reference the media files.

 

All Done!

VIDEO TUTORIAL:

RESOURCES:

• Cloudberry S3 Explorer Freeware Web Site - http://cloudberrylab.com/
• Amazon S3 web page – http://aws.amazon.com/s3
• Developer Connection web site – http://developer.amazonwebservices.com
• Resource Center for Amazon S3 – http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/s3/resources
• Developer Forums - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/s3/forums
• Solutions Built on Amazon S3 - http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=66