Amazon S3Last year, Amazon rolled out it Simple Storage Service (S3), which allows you to store and retrieve data on the same infrastructure that Amazon uses to run their own sites. Almost instantaneously you can get access to “highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure” with minimal cost outlay. While initially designed for developers to build scalable applications, Amazon S3 can also come in handy if you want to publicly distribute large files without tying up bandwidth on your own web server.

  1. Sign up for Amazon Simple Storage Service, you can use your Amazon.com password.
  2. Install the S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) extension, then restart Firefox.
  3. In Firefox, click on Tools, S3 Organizer, click on Manage Accounts, enter your Account Name and copy paste the AWS Access Identifiers from your Amazon Web Services Account. Click Add to save the settings.
  4. S3Fox works like a typical FTP application, with local files on the left and the Amazon S3 storage on the right. Start with right clicking on the right pane and click Create Directory (this will create the “bucket” in S3 terminology). Open the directory and transfer over the file you wish to make public.
  5. Once the file is uploaded, right click and choose Edit ACL. Give Everyone Read permissions and click Save.
  6. Right click the file and click Copy URL to Clipboard. Now you have a publicly accessible link to publish on the web.

Amazon S3 Pricing

  • Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
  • $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

Private label Amazon S3 (s3.anchorite.org) with Virtual Hosting of Buckets.

To add BitTorrent support (no additional charge) just add  “?torrent” to the end of the link.