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Hosting Webcomics or other Images on Amazon S3
Here’s a quick rundown on getting started using Amazon’s storage services for your cartoon website.
What the heck is Amazon S3?
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. Amazon provides you with an online storage space where you can store files, in our case cartoons.
It is not a hosting service, it acts as a supplement to whatever company you’re hosting your site on.
Then why would I use Amazon S3 for my Webcomic?
- Dependability. If you experience a sudden spike in popularity due to getting on the Digg.com homepage or similar having the bulk of your media on S3 can really help to keep your site up and running as S3 will scale with demand. Most hosts won’t be able to stand the sudden spike in traffic. And having your site down at your moment of triumph is not too fun.
- Pricing. The pricing is very decent so in low traffic times, it won’t cost you much. And in high traffic times the prices shouldn’t be crazy either. For instance currently a GB of bandwidth costs 17 cents. To put it that in practical terms one cartoon at 40KB would have to be viewed 25,00 times for you to get a 17 cent charge. There are some other charges such as storage but all in all, you can see how in most cases it’s a pretty good deal.
- Geekiness. You’re a geek and you like trying out new things. It’s pretty easy and fun technology to use plus it may be suitable for other things for you such as backing up personal files or photos which a lot of people do.
In the case of semichaotic.com the nav images and javascript are about 14kb which people will load once and then every subsequent cartoon will only be 2kb for the new HTML page. In other words it’s a super light website – if your website has a lot of other heavy images and external files to load for every page then you might want to consider putting them on S3 also.
The Three Things you need to start using Amazon S3 for your Images
- An account with Amazon. You can sign up here: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
- Software that lets you get files from your desktop to the online Amazon Storage space. I use the S3 Organizer which is a Firefox plug-in. Super easy to use, basically just drag and drop. Your files are in a window on the left side and your online storage space is on the right hand side. Drag and drop my friends. Download the S3 Organizer.
- The ability to make a cName change at your host. Your bucket (what Amazon calls the online folder space) will be a sub-domain. In my case it’s funny.semichaotic.com, this is just an alias to my Amazon bucket.
A lot of people have virtual hosting and the option to make a cName change is probably not in your cPanel or whatever default control panel came with the hosting so you’ll have to send your hosting support people a nice email so they can make the change for you. Something like this…
I need a cName Change
… This sub-domain…
funny.semichaotic.com
… should point to…
funny.semichaotic.com.s3.amazonaws.com
But of course with your own information. It’ll take a while for these changes to propagate so don’t expect it to happen right away.
Tips for Using the S3 Firefox Organizer to get your Cartoons Online
- Always remember to right click on your newly uploaded files and choose “Edit ACL”. This determines who can see your images. You need Everyone, Authenticated Users and Owner all set to Read if you want things to be publicly viewable.
- If you don’t want people to see a virtual listing of your sub-domain then right click on the sub-domain folder and make sure that Everyone is set to Not Read. The individual files in the folder will still be publicly accessible but the no one will be able to see a listing of the folder’s contents.
Wrapping it All Up
Here are a few links for you to check out if you’re interested.
Amazon S3 Sign Up
Amazon S3 Pricing List
Download S3 Storage for Firefox
.. and this good tutorial on using the S3 Firefox Organizer. That’s about it. It’s all pretty straightforward except for the cName change but most hosts shouldn’t have a problem making the change for you. Good luck.
Webcomics Info | January 6th, 2010
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