Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service

If you want a more automated/command line way to upload images to s3 with public access I suggest using s3sync with the -p option.

I wrote about setting up s3sync here
http://blog.eberly.org/2006/10/09/how-automate-your-backup-to-amazon-s3-using-s3sync/
for private backups, but it would be the same process for public accessible files if you add the -p option to s3sync. I have successfully tested using s3sync for public files using a custom CNAME record - img.mydomain.com - s3.amazonaws.com.

Follow the link mentioned by John Spurlocks above for setting up Virtual hosting with S3.

S3Fox is ok, but with larger uploads, you’ll want to look elsewhere. I’ve got over 40G at S3, and from my testing, S3Drive (free) http://www.s3drive.net/ is where you’ll want to look. Tell 'em airjrdn sent you. :slight_smile:

reddit’s started doing the same thing with all their images, including the logo, mailbox icon, and up and down arrows, probably since your previous article made its front page. (The people behind reddit show repeated evidence of monitoring their own front page and making use of things promoted to it, usually in one-off reddit logos.)

Best thing about this: I no longer get big ugly pixelated WTFs instead of your images in my web-based feed reader!

No matter what happens, I recommend fluids, and continues used of STRONG and EM tags in all text.

Very interesting stuff in comments :wink:
Really useful.
I’m as dreamhost customer currently is a bit dissatisfied, but not much. I have 150 GB BW/month and 100 GB storage. All works pretty well, except for upload speed from Europe and periodical downtimes.

We’ll look what happens soon when I’ll suck all 2.5 TB :wink:
Amazon S3 is a bit pricey for non-profit, compared to these shared megacheap (megashit?) hostings floating around.

If your after cheap storage and bandwidth, your far better off with someplace like POWWEB. (http://www.powweb.com) which currently sells 300gb of storage, and 3000Gb (100Gb a day) of bandwidth a month for only $7.77 a month.

And they’re fab - I’ve been with them for years, and they’ve only been getting better.

About Amazon account numbers: this isn’t really secret information, since there’s not much anyone can do without unless they have your various private identifiers as well.

You might want to use S3 as a backing store for a cacheing frontend that keeps the most recently used N images locally or something. Of course, this doesn’t really buy you anything in terms of bandwidth unless it’s running in EC2 where you have free traffic to and from S3.

Gah! s/without/with it/

Some people have gone the full monty route (as in all the way, not fully nude) and put their entire website on S3. I was browsing around the other day and after looking at the url I was redirected to I realized everything, the page, css, js and images were all coming off of S3.

While an interesting concept I can’t really imagine that’s going to be all that great when it comes to search rank or a nice friendly url.

Dean:

I’ve been using S3 backup for backing up my PCs, and am thinking about using it for backing up a server or two. It’s a little clunky in places, but I really like where it’s going.

http://www.maluke.com/s3man/

Is it me, or has the CAPTCHA here been stuck on the same word for awhile?

Michael

Ever since you started the image hosting business… I haven’t been able to see any of the images.

I haven’t been able to see any of the images

Why? Is this URL blocked for you?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/

How do I create a bucket to begin with using S3Fox?

Agree with Joshua. WebSense blocks the images because they’re coming from Amazon, and “Shopping” sites are restricted here at work.

Did anyone de-mosaic that account number yet? I’ve been screaming “ENHANCE! ZOOM! ENHANCE!” at my monitor for 30 minutes now and nothing has happened.

Maybe I should use a flashier operating system?

JohnVance and KenW:

I submitted a ticket to WebSense to unblock amazonaws.com, which is CLEARLY not a shopping site. Unless you’re buying bandwidth, I suppose.

If you’re behind WebSense and you are seeing blocked images from amazonaws, I urge you to also file a ticket with them via this online form.

http://www.websense.com/global/en/ProductsServices/MasterDatabase/URLChange.php

Also, I set up a CNAME alias so all future images will be in the format

http://images.codinghorror.com/image.png

Hopefully that will help as well.

Here is a ruby script that offers Unix like commands to access the S3 service.

http://designandcode.blogspot.com/2007/01/cli-to-amazon-s3-service-using-ruby.html

People comparing amazon to generic cheap hosting are missing the point and don’t understand the service.

A nice website that you can use to manage your S3 account, including logging and setting the access control policy is a href="http://s3browse.com"http://s3browse.com/a