At 48Web, we use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for all of our business file storage, backups, and as a content delivery network. In past at startups I have been involved with we have had to purchase file servers for backup and network storage as well as media streaming servers. Now we have “cloud storage” that, buzz words aside, is really quite a rermarkable solution for a small startup business. There are no startup costs – you just sign up and pay for what you use.
So how do we use Amazon S3 for our business? First off we use it for file storage. If you have ever worked in any size business – you are likely familiar with “file servers” or “network drives” where a bunch of files are located that are accessible by authorized users in your company. We use Amazon S3 for that. It’s accessible anywhere – on any pc or mac – and has authentication and authorization roles so you can lock it down.
We also use Amazon S3 for all of our backups. We backup our WordPress sites to Amazon S3 regularly. Our Subversion (source control) repositories are automatically backed up to Amazon S3. And last, our PCs and Macs are backed up to Amazon S3. We are all taken care of – in “the cloud”.
Last we use Amazon S3 as a content delivery network. This CDN serves our images, videos, and podcasts to the websites we host. We do this for several reasons. Their Amazon CloudFront service:
“..gives businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments”
Well said. In addition to that Amazon CloudFront uses an “edge network” – distributed locations – for content delivery to ensure the best peformance. Think of this edge network like there are servers storing your multimedia content in Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. If I request your content here in Des Moines, IA it will grab the data from the Chicago server – because it’s the closest geographically.
If you have any questions about using Amazon S3 or CloudFront in your business, let us know!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I am excited about Amazon S3 and love posts that help people to understand the value of the service! We have a freeware product that helps to work with Amazon S3 and CloudFront – CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3. http://cloudberrylab.com/
I hope the author and readers of this blog will find it useful! Thanks!
I’ve been using CloudBerry on my PC… Working on a full review thanks!