Tag Archives: cloud

Lions and iClouds and iOS 5: WWDC 2011 Roundup

Jun 7, 2011 by Matt | Posted in General No Comments

Too busy to watch the liveblogs of Apple’s big WWDC keynote? Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most noteworthy links. There’s a lot changing in iOS, and OS X Lion is just around the corner. Then there’s iCloud, the crazy service that does more than most speculated.

CloudApp: Share Files Fast

May 24, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools One Comment

CloudApp is a nifty application that lets you quickly and easily share files. All you have to do is drag a file onto the menu bar. Once the file is uploaded to the “Cloud,” a short URL to the file is automatically copied to your clipboard. You can’t get much easier than that.

Your files are stored on Amazon S3, mirrored across multiple servers and facilities, so it’s very unlikely that you will have any data loss issues.

One interesting part of the application is its extensibility. You can install a number of “Raindrop” plugins that allow the app to perform different actions when you press the universal CloudApp keyboard shortcut. Perhaps you’re in iTunes? Pressing the key combination will upload the selected songs. Photoshop? The current canvas will be uploaded. Firefox, Safari, or Chrome? A short URL for the current web page will be generated.

The service only works on Mac OS X for now, but there is a REST API, so it’s entirely possible for someone to write a Windows or Linux client.

CloudApp is in public beta, and the developers have not implemented any visible means of monetization. My guess is that it will remain free, but I do wonder how they intend to sustain their service. Ads on the web page? Premium plans?

Amazon S3: A Cheap Podcast Host?

Apr 12, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Hosting 5 Comments

Podcasts are fun to create, but they can be expensive to host. Typically they’re larger than 10 megabytes, and when you have a thousand plus people downloading each of your weekly episodes, your bandwidth bill can get pretty large. (They can also eat up a lot of your server’s disk space.)

Many podcasters, rather than pay for ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, use podcast syndication services like Libsyn to host their shows. Libsyn charges $12/month for unmetered bandwidth, and a monthly upload quota of 250MB. (There are a few other pricing tiers they offer, but the “libsyn250″ is probably the one most weekly hour-length podcasts will require.)

There’s another option, though.

Amazon S3 is a neat service that allows you to “pay as you go,” and host your files on Amazon’s speedy cloud servers. They charge $0.15 per gigabyte in bandwidth, as well as a monthly $0.15/GB storage fee.

I’ve been using Amazon S3 for off-site storage of my server backups for awhile, and it recently occurred to me that would be a great place to host podcast files.

If your subscribers were to download 20GB worth of podcast files in a month, for example, you would pay a mere $3. (You would technically have to pay a little more for the storage of the files, but it probably wouldn’t even be another dollar.)

If you coupled it with Amazon’s CloudFront service, a CDN that pulls from your S3 account, you could help speed up your subscribers’ downloads. (A CDN, in case you were wondering, is a service that mirrors your files across servers in different geographic locations, to ensure that your users are downloading from a nearby server.) It costs the same $0.15/per gigabyte, minus the silly “thousandth of a cent” HTTP request charges.

I wonder how many podcasters are using Amazon Web Services. It seems like a fairly affordable, and certainly reliable, option.