Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) is for Internet based companies that need a reliable and flexible place to store and retrieve any amount of data required by a single website visitor or by thousands of users trying to simultaneously access your online videos, downloads and other media. Until recently, online businesses typically stored this type of data on their shared hosted server provide by Godaddy, Hostmonster, Hostgator or similar provider. Now that more and more businesses use video to support their business sales and operations, there is a heightened awareness that the typical shared hosting model is inadequate for this type of on-the-wire traffic.
You probably participated in a product launch or even a highly popular online seminar where the system appeared broken. Videos would hang or not run at all, audio wasn’t synchronized and choppy or maybe you received error messages like “we’re sorry, the server is unavailable.” Maybe you were willing to retry again the next day, but you sure hoped that the 24 hour-only expiration on that great deal or bonus wouldn’t transpire. Or maybe what happened was that you drifted off to another site where you ended up spending you bucks on their product or service.
Audio and video marketing is far more network and server intensive than is the traditional post with oodles of copy write touting the benefits of the deal. When you started your hosting with Godaddy or similar hosting you were presented with the plan offering 99.9% uptime guarantee for $8-$10 bucks a month. Did you ever imagine that you would need 99.99%? If your business model includes large data download, audio and video it’s time you looked to highly reliable and affordable services like Amazon’s S3 cloud service.
Cloud services is a term meaning services that are available from outside your hosting through the Internet. You can store all your files, videos, images, even your own PC backup data on an Amazon S3 server. This is all available to you and your audience as long as they have access to the Internet. The beauty is that this Cloud server isn’t going to take a dive if all of a sudden your traffic goes from one sleepy dude to a storm of thousands all clicking the play button on your sales video at the same time.
When you think about the sales you could lose without this type of availability you are probably also wondering what the price tag is for Amazon S3. It’s surprisingly affordable at less than around $20USD/mo for about 70GB of data. You can get to 70GB pretty fast when you using a lot of online video.
Yes, your Hostgators and others charge you around $8 plus a month for “unlimited” storage, but you have been paying for that “unlimited” whether you used it or not. In the case of Amazon S3 you only pay for what you use. The same goes for bandwidth usage. You only pay for what you use. This is also darn affordable at around .17UDS/GB.
The real dollar value though for S3 is that your images, audio and video are presented to your audience quicker. This means better sharper video, cleaner audio and a tighter connection to your viewer. The professional presentation can be a deal maker.
