SteadyOffload.com provides an innovative, subtle and convenient way to offload images. The whole mechanism there is quite different from ordinary photosharing sites and S3. Instead of permanently uploading your images to another host, their cachebot crawls your site and mirrors the content in a temporary cache on their servers. All you have to do is include a little piece of 1K JavaScript in the head of HTML pages. The image remains stored on your server while it is being delivered from the SteadyOffload cache. The URL of the cached image on their server is dynamically generated at page loading time, very scrambled and is changing often, so you don’t have to worry about hotlinking. This means that there is an almost non-existent chance that the cached content gets exposed outside of your web application.
It’s definitely worth trying because it’s not a photosharing site like Flickr or Photobucket nor a storage service like S3 but exactly a service for offloading static content.
Cost of bandwidth comes under $0.2 per GB - affordable, efficient and convenient. Looks like a startup but lures me very much. Definitely simpler than Amazon S3 and much more suited than Flickr.
Amazon S3 could be used as alternative daily backup solution, all you need is some tools to upload/download/manage your buckets. For simple S3 upload try an applet such as JS3Upload: http://www.jfileupload.com/products/js3upload/index.html
Amazon S3 is interesting because it’s really cheap.
DONT use dreamhost for anything semi-serious. I run several adult websites and once you start getting a decent flow going they hit you with every excuse possible. They’ll try and will shut you down for excessive queries, high traffic per second or a myriad of other reasons to “persuade” you to move to their premium accounts, read PAY more.
Limelight is a much better option for a CDN
Pictures For Us is a free gallery and easy to use pictures and images hosting service. You are welcome to use our simple form to upload your photos, images, and videos and share them with other people on the Web. For uploading your photos and pictures, please use our free registration service to open an account and start creating your own images and photos gallery.
I tried out s3 storage for a day and it was a nightmare! I spend several days re-engineering my application so that I could use s3 storage.
I had everything working well after some serious 15 hr days of coding. I launched the new version and an hour later s3 storage went down for 5 hrs!
that is way too scary for me. I had worked with amazon cloud servers before and thy were pretty reliable, but this kind of outage totally killed any intentions I have of using s3 storage.
I rolled back my app to the previous version and I will never take that chance with s3 storage again. I’d rather pay the $$ for a server that won’t fail for 5 hrs at a time. if all of my music files were on there and something happens to delete them, My application would be screwed and i would lose thousands of users.
Thanks for the review Jeff. And lots of useful stuff in the comments! Has anyone found an easy way to use S3 to stream video into a Wordpress blog? I’ve been looking at the various plugins, but none seem to make it simple to use S3
I have just posted an application to launchpad: https://launchpad.net/s3daemon that scans folders for files matching a specified pattern and transfers them to S3 after which the local file is deleted. Along with the daemon is an apache module that handles requests to the targeted folders, when a file cannot be found locally it will send a redirect for the caller to look for it in S3 storage.
I am not sure if it would have helped you here or not. If nothing more it would have automated the initial upload of your files.
The application is fairly new (as of Nov. 2008) and doesn’t support windows yet but it is open source so if you are keen you can do it yourself.
Hi Guys, I am looking into hosting my FLV files on S3 for an online tv website I am building, question: - the costs for bandwidth in the UK are huge and am looking to see if this is a good option. Could be, in extreme circumstance, 1000 people looking at a 2min 2mb FLV video file. Is Amazon up to this or am I better hosting elsewhere?
Hi, there is a new solid S3/FTP GUI tool CrossFTP available for Win, Mac, and Linux. Easy to create/rename/delte/manage the buckets and objects.
Available at http://www.crossftp.com/