Planning to host your videos on Amazon s3 (simple storage service) but first want to know how much it will cost, then use the Amazon S3 hosting calculator .

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?