After a chance meeting in the USA, where I was demonstrating eZs3, I suddenly realised that Microsoft, who are taking a pounding in the press because of the way they are always missing the boat when it comes to the web, could finally steal a lead.

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

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Amazon S3 have their own approach to pricing. Offering a ‘pay as you go’ service it is a really good fit for bloggers and online marketers. If you don’t get any traffic, you aren’t paying. If you get lots of traffic, then you know that you won’t get hit with a costly surcharge fee or have your blog turned off by your ISP.

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

Amazon s3 media solution www.eZs3 continues to grow at an phenomenal rate. The media service which makes it easy for Amazon s3 users to upload, deploy and track their video and audio files has now helped it’s user community to distribute over 57 million files.. 57, 344, 237 in fact.

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!”

Pro Blogger David Risley talks about where a blogger should host their videos and  offers 3 routes: Free Hosting, Self Hosting or Remote Hosting

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

Having asked people to us Twitter to enter our eZs3 100 million competition - where you can win over $1800 worth of prizes in software, training and a brand new Flip camera – I wanted to show the competition on our Twitter page – http://twitter.com/ezs3

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Amazon are celebrating 3 years of Simpe Storage Service this month and have announced that they will offer 3 months of reduced prices, for ‘transfer-in‘

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?