If you are on Windows you can use CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3. With FTP like client it makes managing files in S3 EASY
http://cloudberrylab.com/ It supports most of the Amazon S3 and CloudFront features and It is a FREEWARE
I just S3 for file hosting of my mp3 blog, and I was using S3Fox for awhile and wanted to switch to JungleDisk, but there’s no way to manipulate the ACLs using JD, which sucks.
S3Fox is sooo slow, it totally crushes Firefox for me, and my computer is fairly decent. Does anyone know why it does that and how to solve it? Thanks.
I use Amazon S3 for my website:
The reliability is amazing, and my monthly bills never cross 50 cents! I recommended this service to anyone.
Have a look to JS3Explorer. It’s an Applet that provides S3 bucket file manager. It comes with a feature you won’t see anywhere else. It can simulate folders, it’s not new ? But you can see flat listing and fix filename issues generated by third party S3 applications.
I am using and i highly recommend this free image hosting service : http://xtupload.com . They are completely free moreover their offer unlimited bandwidth , disk space , a advanced online editor , image spin up , gallery etc … so do not waste your time and money and enjoy the free service
Wow, information overload… plenty of good views downs and ups on here! now i have what 20 tabs open from links on this page… Awsome! the search for truth on S3 continues…
why use S3 ? if you are worried about your own bandwidth , use others bandwidth, I use a image hosting and sharing service that it rocks : http://www.cerzo.com
besides that free image hosting service that I told you 2 days ago, I found another brand new , promising image host : http://www.my-image-host.com
I use S3Toolbox to move my files to Amazon S3.
It still misses some features but it is free and much more reliable than S3Fox
You can also try www.hostanyimage.com - the free a href=http://www.hostanyimage.comimage host/a. It provides unlimited bandwidth and space 
For those of you that keep pointing to free image hosts, what happens when those free images hosts go under or decide to stop hosting images a few years from now (or sooner) and you have like hundreds of images stored on those sites?
With Amazon S3, that’s not an issue. AND IT’S FUCKING CHEAP!
Why is it not an issue? Because you’re storing to a subdomain. So if for some reason Amazon were to go kaput, just find another host, use the same subdomain, and you’re BACK.
Of course, for that to work you should be saving the files on your HDD in the same hierarchy but only a dummy wouldn’t do that.
Quote:
"Dear HostanyImage.com Users,
It’s with unbearable sadness I’m here to inform you all that www.hostanyimage.com was a victim of recent HyperVM hacking incident. 100, 000 of websites which were hosted on VPS servers were hacked and suffered complete data loss, and the news is the owner of LxLabs committed suicide, whom apparently has hacked (as per rumors). "
Oh boy…
While S3 is stable and reasonably priced, I still wonder why people are willing to work with manipulating their sites to conform to the S3 structures. Conventional CDN’s are much better. The best ones only require that you add/change a dns entry.
Just thought I’d toss in my 2 cents. I’ve just completed a full migration to the Amazon data centers…so you can call me a fanboy.
For dynamic web pages, I host them on an Amazon EC2 instance.
For static images/videos/etc, I host them on Amazon S3. For the one’s that get hit frequently, I’m using the Amazon Cloudfront service which pulls your S3 files to a worldwide collection of edge servers.
So far, response time has been over twice as good as my last ISP. Color me happy!
Dreamhost (for $9.99/month) gives me 2.7 TERAbytes of bandwidth, and 233 GIGAbytes of disk space.
Seems like a better deal to me if I’m reading the S3 pricing correctly.
I am starting to get into S3 stuff, and have seen some slow loading from amazon, as opposed to locally hosting. The costs are nice compared to my hosting, but my latest idea is to use a local script to check various cheapo hosts and redirect to whichever host is up, thus avoiding the down-time problem of 1and1.
I am launching a site in the next week or so, so I’ll know better then, but so far, the tests look really good - and since I am just using 1and1, etc. for static hosting, I shouldn’t run into the shutdowns due to the minimal CPU limits. I wondered if 1and1 would complain about a constant 6Mbps connection for a couple days, and they didn’t, except for my ftp script getting killed once a day or so.
If it works, I think it will be much better than Amazon’s services, since the files are easy to get to ssh/ftp/rsync/etc and can run some mysql or php on the same site if you needed to.
Great post thanks
I would also like to add the there is a new Free S3 analytics application called Prism from sisense
Its on private beta but there are places on the web you can get the code
Nice article. We’ve just started using S3 for images/css/js to reduce bandwitdh from the main servers.
Jeff, this article was a great find. I’m on the Amazon list so when I begin doing some serious traffic, I plan on using this service for images.
I enjoyed reading other alternative solutions. It prompted me to look into another possible solution which I consider a poor man’s way to host images.
After doing some website optimization techniques I learned from Yahoo, the literature described about using a Content Distribution Network. I did a Google search and came across The Coral Content Distribution Network.
URL http://coralcdn.org/
I tested the service for my images and flash animation on at least three of my websites.
Since these three web sites contain more images than my other sites, it provided me with a decent testing ground. The downside to using the Coral service was that I found it wasn’t consistently dependable. It seemed to work only 90% of the time; I guess I shouldn’t have too high of expectations for something that is a FREE service.
Anyway, I was thinking one work around could be, I would monitor my sites uptime and if my site was ever down for whatever reason, I can automatically rewrite my apache .htaccess file (i.e., via a script) to load the images and flash using the Coral Network.
I have a shared hosting account. Does anyone know if your site is temporary down, can you still FTP into it? I appreciate any feedback.