NetTipsDB

Amazon S3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service

Lately I’ve been looking around some solutions what could reduce the load and connections to my server and I found out, one interesting service from Amazon, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This service allow you to store your web files into cloud storage in amazon infrastructure, and can retrieve it from anywhere through a custom link.

First thing first, you have to have an account with Amazon S3. You need to fill in a valid payment options, in my case, I have to put it my credit card number for payment purposes. Talking about payment, let check Amazon S3 service rate.  This is quoted from Amazon S3 page. The price is quite low, if you’re putting small web related files. It will be charged according to how many data been transfered from Amazon S3.

For United States

Storage

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Data Transfer

• $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in

• $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests

• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

For Europe

Storage

• $0.180 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.170 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.160 per GB – next 400 TB / month of storage used
• $0.150 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Data Transfer

• $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in

• $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests

• $0.012 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
• $0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

Once you have your account created and ready, go to http://aws.amazon.com, go to “Your Account” and “Security Credentials”. Look for “Access Keys”. This key is like a password to your storage. So, don’t reveal it to anyone!!

To start, you have to have a client to access Amazon S3. You can either code your own code to access it through programming API, or use ready coded application. Of course the later is faster For me, I use CloudBerry S3. It is a Amazon S3 explorer.  You can manage your file, alot like you’re using FileZilla to manage your file with FTP account. There is a free version, and the free version works like charm for me, i don’t need the paid version.

Click to view in full size

The those keys, and put it in your CloudBerry. As shown below.

Your Amazon S3 account information in CloudBerry

To start using Amazon S3, you need some sort like address, a unique identifier that will be part of the URL you going to use to access your files on Amazon S3. They call it bucket. You have to create your bucket, and you can create as many as you want, as long as it is unique within Amazon S3 system. In my case I have created “images.nettipsdb“, so it becomes accessible through http://images.nettipsdb.s3.amazonaws.com/. If I put an image file, named myphoto.jpg in my buckets root location, it will become accessible though http://images.nettipsdb.s3.amazonaws.com/myphoto.jpg.

I have placed some static files, like images and javascript files onto Amazon S3, as Amazon S3 doesn’t do any processing, it is just a simple storage service, and the service name tells. I noticed in my apache log, there’s a lot of files been requested to the web server to load up the images and other files. I have placed a mod_evasive, an apache module that limit connection made to apache to avoid Denial Of Service (DOS) Attack. I’m afraid some of my users won’t be able to retrieve some files because of this. This is one purpose of having Amazon S3 to help my site. There are some others tricks that might help, such as CSS sprite and PHP speedy wordpress plugin, but I have some problem to implement this on my site.

What I did, I did some hard coded modifications on my themes, and some plugins that loads up some javascripts. For example, in my themes header.php file, I replaced

with

Therefore, it will load the javascript file straight away from Amazon S3. Now, I can see the difference in the request made to my web server, a lot less. But make sure, you have a backup of all your files, your modified files, and also the whole bucket, in case u need them. Right now, your hosting and Amazon S3 run side by side. If your files in Amazon S3 accidently deleted, your site will not work.

The best waty is still to combine images into 1 image file with CSS sprite or combining javascript. But I have problem with some wordpress plugin for that purpose. Will into it soon.

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