Webmaster-Source » Image Hosting

Amazon S3 Pricing Explained

Matt — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:00:46 +0000

Amazon S3 is a service that allows you to host files of all kinds very cheaply. You can host images and podcast files to take the strain off the server that runs your website; you can hook into the API and use S3 to store data uploaded by users in a web app. You could even backup your personal files from your computer to S3. With a maximum individual file size of 5GB, it’s perfect for distributing an independent film or software.

One major point of confusion with S3 is pricing. How much does it cost, really?

You pay $0.15 per gigabyte stored, on a monthly basis. If you store truly massive amounts of data (upwards of 50 terabytes), you get a small per-gigabyte discount. If you have 1GB sitting on S3 for a year, you will pay $1.80 for the entire year.
You then pay for the amount of data transfer each month. Pricing starts at $0.17 per gigabyte transferred. (If you are able to have more than 10TB worth of data transfer each month, you will pay the first discount tier’s rates, $0.13/GB.)
There are very minimal charges for file management requests such as COPY, POST, and LIST. They end up being “$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests” and “$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests,” with fees waived for DELETE requests.
Prices vary slightly depending on the geographic locations of the datacenters. According to the FAQ page, it doesn’t matter where you live: Anybody can use S3. It’s the location of specific data that determines price.

No setup fees, no long-term contracts. Just pay-as-you-go. (Sadly, PayPal is not an option for payment.)

Amazon S3 seems to be a stable and cheap way to store various types of data. It’s trusted by large sites like Twitter, Envato, and SmugMug, among others. I would definitely consider it if I really got into something like podcasting, and didn’t want to cripple my server from large file downloads.

Chevereto: A Free Image Hosting Script

Matt — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:55:39 +0000

Chevereto is an open-source image hosting script that could easily be used to create a service like ImageShack or TinyPic (providing you have a good server) or a smaller personal operation.

You can see a demo of the script here.

It looks pretty nice at a glance, and it could potentially be useful for a lot of people. If you hacked it a bit to require a logon to upload, it would make a nice personal image uploader for images you wish to hotlink somewhere else, such as forum signatures, photos in blog entries, etc.

I rather like the idea of a personal image host, though I don’t know what exactly I would do with one…

Poll: Image Host or wp-content/uploads?

Matt — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:20:13 +0000

When you add images to your blog posts, where do you upload them? Do you store them on an image host like TinyPic.com, or do you prefer to keep them on your own server somewhere?

There are advantages to both methods, and of course, disadvantages.

As of this writing, I put most of my images on TinyPic, though I’ve lately been a little worried about that. What if TinyPic decides to delete them? What if something happens and they lose a bunch of data? I happens. It would be lot of work to re-upload images and edit all of my posts, but it would be “safer.” Though on the other hand, I’d be storing more files on my server, and transferring more bytes as well…

I’m still undecided, but what’s your preferred method?