According to Managing Director Tom Cone, who expected the competition to run until September when he first launched it March 2009; “We’ve seen explosive growth in the last couple of months”

“Our new services are proving to be very popular with internet marketers and others wanting to use video in their online promotions’

This highly rated  solution allows business owners to make full use of scalable Amazon s3 hosting services and the Amazon Cloudfront (Content Distribution Network) to power their video marketing projects

“Amazon make it affordable, we make it possible” says Tom

eZs3 pronounced easy s3, served up 100 million files for their users Saturday June 27th and Dominic was the Twitterer who guessed closest to that date, winning: Camtasia Studio 6 and Snagit 6, Barefoot Bootcamp,  Video Intensive Training Course and brand new Flip Video Camera

Who knows, maybe the next competition will have to be guess when eZs3 hits a Billion?

Now you can quickly compare hosting costs with your current ISP, with this handy ready reckoner – a quick and easy calculator provided by Amazon to help work out their S3 file transfer and hosting charges.

Here’s a recent example:
1. I want to upload videos and embed them in my blog each week.
2. Each file is about 20 megs
3. Each video gets about 400 views (Gradually increasing)

Amazon use Gigabytes on their handy Amazon S3 hosting calculator - so in this case we have to remember to divide by 50 to get the 20 Megabyte equivalent! (for a 10 meg file divide by 100 etc. etc.)

Here’s the calculations for a 20 meg file:

Hosting with Amazon S3 = the one-time upload fee for the file + hosting the file for a month + Bandwidth (views x filesize)

20 Megabyte=50th of a Gigabyte

Upload Cost = $0.10 / 50
Storage Cost = $0.15 / 50
400 Views at 20Mb = 8000Mb Bandwidth = 8GB
Transfer Cost = 8 x $0.17 = $1.36

So to upload a 20 meg file – a fifth of one cent
To store a 20 meg file – just less than a third of a cent each month
The bandwidth of a 20 meg file – $1.36 for 400 views (just over a third of a cent per viewer!)

So..you’re looking at less than $1.40 per month for a 20 Meg video with 400 viewers!
For 1000 views $3.40 (20 gig)

How does that compare?

The easy to enter Twitter competition hosted by www.eZs3.com is into the final stretch and one lucky Twitterer must win over $1800 ($ one thousand eight hundred) worth of software, technology and expert training!

“The 100 million competition has to be the easiest competition in the world” Said eZs3 founder Tom Cone who launched it when he noticed how quickly his service was growing

“All you have to do is post on Twitter your guess when you think eZs3 will hit 100 million files – in dd/mm/yy format. That’s easy!”

www.eZs3.com provides a service to Amazon s3 account holders, helping to make it very easy to upload, manage and deploy media files.

Here’s a quick run down of how the service has grown 7700 percent in the last 6 months!

Aug 2008  = 1 million
Dec 2008 =  6 million
Jan  2009 = 10 million
Feb 2009 = 23 million
Mar 2009 = 38 million
Apr 2009 = 57 million
May 2009 = 77 million

At this rate, it looks like the 100 million will be hit in late June or early July!

The lucky winner will get

A copy of Techsmith’s red-hot software: Camtasia Studio 6 and Snagit 6

The unique Barefoot Bootcamp from Carrie Wilkerson – The Barefoot Exectutive

Perry Lawrence – Ask Mr Video – is offering a free place on his Video Intensive Training Course

And a brand new Flip Video Camera

77 million files delivered by eZs3 already

There’s stll time to enter!

They should buy Twitter - right from under the eyes of Google. Here’s the story…

I was talking with SEO expert Nikhil Rajpal at the Membergate workshop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire at the weekend, about eZs3 and what our ambitions are.

We are very lucky to have some of the top internet marketers as customers, and I am privileged to see how they are going about their work, using media in their projects and how they connect that to various traffic streams – including Twitter. They tend to be entrepreneurs with a clear focus for online business

Nikhil of  eXclusive concepts work with hundreds of corporate clients and are Yahoo partners.  It was, like every other Membergate gathering, a very open and sharing discussion. We covered a lot of ground including internet marketing, traffic, landing pages, visitor profiles, buyer behaviour and conversion processes.

Nikhil pointed out several smart ideas, which we will employ, as they will help make the videos we host Search Engine Optimised. This will make eZs3 even more attractive to corporations with branded video.

As when they embed video on their site, it will be optimised in it’s own right.

We got to talking about other techniques, like follow-up, continuity and exclusivity – all things I am familiar with from my Membergate experience

I asked if his clients could use Twitter. He pointed out that Google results currently showing for Twitter will reach a peak and then will settle down. I asked why YouTube still scored so highly.. and we agreed that was probably due to ownership!

As we talked about Twitter and SEO, that’s when I had an epiphany!

I had read about Twitter in USA Today, there was a report about how Twittering was making dates difficult! Then again a couple of days later, there was the Dominos Pizza ‘incident’ and they used Twitter to reach the online audience.

So all this was bubbling around the back of my head and I was explaining that more and more corporates are using Twitter to search for their brand to keep on top of rumours, gossip and feedback – Dominos are using it for promotions and vouchers!

Then I pointed out the fact that we had been using it in the conference to ask the Twitter community for suggestions on where to eat in Portsmouth!

Boom!

That’s when I figured, Twitter isn’t a 140 character blogging site – it’s a Human Powered Search Engine

An organic search engine. Interactive. Addictive. Informative. Fresh.  Insightful.

Just add a rating system (perhaps ala eBay) so we can praise those who Tweet out great answers and perhaps reward them.

Think of Twitter as a “Human-Optimised Search Engine” – it’s an excellent cross-over between the Social Media that connects people and a Search Engine resource.

As such, it’s the most powerful search resource on the planet.

No wonder Google are looking at buying it!

If Micorsoft don’t buy it, they really could be missing out on the last seat at the Search Engine Table!

Twitterers… TwitterVote
If you think I make a good point – twitter #ezs3right
if you think I am miles off – please twitter #eZs3wrong

But how much does it cost if you have a 20 meg video and have  400  regular viewers?

Amazon use Gigabytes on their handy  Amazon S3 hosting calculator — so you have to remember to divide by 50 to get the Megabyte equivalent!

Here’s the calculations:

Hosting with Amazon S3 = the one-time upload fee for the file + hosting the file for a month + bandwidth (views x filesize)

20 Megabyte=50th of a Gigabyte

Upload Cost = $0.10 / 50
Storage Cost = $0.15 / 50
400 Views at 20Mb = 8000Mb Bandwidth = 8GB
Transfer Cost = 8 x $0.17 = $1.36

So to upload a 20 meg file – a fifth of one cent
To store a 20 meg file – just less than a third of a cent each month
The bandwidth of a 20 meg file – $1.36 for 400 views (just over a third of a cent per viewer!)

So..you’re looking at less than $1.40 per month for a 20 Meg video with 400 viewers!

And if you have 1000 viewers it’s just $3.40

Here’s a quick run down of how the service has grown 5700 percent in the last 6 months

Aug 2008  = 1 million
Dec 2008 =  6 million
Jan  2009 = 10 million
Feb 2009 = 23 million
Mar 2009 = 38 million
Apr 2009 = 57 million

The recent addition of a CloudFront ‘enabler’ feature has contributed to the continued uptake of the service and means that users videos are being distributed without lag through Amazons Content Distribution Network (CDN)

“Amazon s3 does the heavy lifting” says Tom Cone the founder, ” we just make it easy!”

Essentially, you have three viable options:

1. Host your video on one of the many video sites (i.e. Youtube) and simply embed into your blog.
2. Host your video on your own server and embed onto your blog locally.
3. Host your video elsewhere, but a place where you have total control.

Of the 3 choices, David really hits the nail on the head when he says ‘Self hosting’ is not a really a viable option

I totally agree: Hosting media on your own blog server is not a good fit. High bandwidth material like video, eats your resources and you  almost reach the point of not wanting the post to be successful!

Too many viewers and you are into ‘overage’ fees.. or just as bad …your host shuts you down!

For me, I see putting media on remote hosting as giving the same freedom to the blogger as Content Management Systems did for designers. Splitting off the media gives you better control.

For the 3rd option the Amazon S3 and eZs3 combo are suggested.

It’s pretty cool to be mentioned on the same page as the big brands

Rather than mess with the intro text and link back and forth to the blog, I thought it would be good to use the background to explain we are having a competition – especially as you have to be on Twitter to enter!

To get started I uploaded a large logo of eZs3, then using Snagit I edited the image until the logo sat in the top left corner of the Twitter page

I then enlarged the image until I was able to see where the standard Twitter info showed and where there was space to put other info in the background area. This gave me a template to work with for a widescreen laptop. As the background will auto-resize for smaller screens.. then I guess it won’t show so well there!

So I was able to get the graphics and value of the prizes on the right hand side and put the growth chart on the left

Now I have my template, I can update my Twitter page with ease and put one-time-only type offers there.. could be an interesting development

Here’s my template – You can see that the logo is well placed to show near the user details and the left and right panels are clearly marked

Click to view it full size then save it if you want to use it for your own  Twitter home page.

If you haven’t got Snagit…  you are welcome to try and win it in the eZs3 100 million competition!

See you on Twitter

Here’s the finished Twitter WideScreen Background:

From Amazon:

” Three years ago this month, Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as “storage for the internet,” providing “highly scalable, reliable, low-latency storage at very low costs.” Since that time, Amazon S3 has experienced dramatic growth, expanded into Europe, and lowered pricing multiple times as we’ve been able to achieve ever greater economies of scale and pass them on to our customers. Today, the service has grown to store over 52 billion objects and serve over 1 trillion requests per year from customers in over 90 countries. Whether you’ve used Amazon S3 to back up files, host static website content, securely share files with your external business partners, or store scientific, financial, or website data for processing via Amazon EC2, you’ve contributed to this growth.“

“Transfer In” is the charge for uploading your material to Amazon Simple Storage Service and it typically costs just 10cents per gigabyte. As part of their birthday celebrations this has been reduced to just 3 cents per gigabyte

Is that a 70% saving?

However, looking at the recent entries to the, I notice that some people have not included the time - only the date in dd / mm/ yyy format

As the entries roll in (twitter in?), I think it will come down to having not only the right day, but also the time of day… so please include the time in your guess

Thanks

TomC