Amazon S3: What it is and why you should be using it in your business
Amazon S3 is short for Amazon Simple Storage Solution… and it’s one of the most useful and affordable services that thousands of online marketers use. If you have an online business or want to start an online business, you can definitely benefit from this service.
It’s scalable, secure and will save you money in the long run. Let’s look at why you need it for your online business.
Saves disk space on your hosting account
When you sign up with a web hosting plan, you’ll get a certain amount of disk space. If you upload your images, files, etc. straight to your hosting account, you’ll slowly but surely end up using up all of your disk space.
It all adds up over time. When that happens, you will be hit with extra charges by the hosting company. It’s either that or you’ll need to sign up for a higher plan where you pay more every month.
With Amazon S3, you can upload all your images and files on to Amazon’s servers and just use the links from there on your sites. So, your disk space on your hosting account will be free and you can stay on an affordable plan for a long time.
But won’t it cost more on Amazon S3? Excellent question… Read the next point.
Only pay for what you use
With Amazon S3, you’ll only pay for the storage that you use… and it’s a very low-cost solution. Even with reasonably large sites, the price usually doesn’t exceed ten dollars. Amazon has lots of storage space and they can afford to offer it real cheap.
Storing your files on S3 will cost much less than if you were to store them on your hosting server and pay for a more expensive hosting plan.
Reduces server resources
By storing your files on S3, you’ll be reducing the demands on your web hosting resources because the images, etc. will be retrieved from Amazon… and not your web host. Your sites will load faster, and you’ll not exceed the quotas that your web host has allotted you.
Secure
Your files and images are secure on Amazon S3. You can backup your buckets and they have state of the art security to protect your files. You can store files that are not available for the public.
Many times, storing files on your host’s servers isn’t totally secure. Your site may get hacked. Google spiders may list your PDF files in the search results and so on. With S3, you can set the permissions for them not to be available to the public.
Easy to use
While Amazon S3 has very complex features, it’s also very simple to use for beginners. Watch a few tutorial videos on YouTube and you’ll understand how it works.
To conclude, Amazon S3 is not a tool/service that’s mentioned often by marketers, but it’s invaluable when it comes to saving you money and protecting your files. It is very inexpensive and will not place a dent on your budget. You only pay for what you use and not a cent more.
Getting started with Amazon S3
If you are just getting started with S3, you can upload and serve your files on their free tier for 1 whole year! After that, it is just $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month ( a terabyte is equal to 1024 GB). That’s a lot of videos, images, ebooks or whatever you want to make available to your customers and it will cost you less than $25 per month!
Remember, you only pay for what you actually use.
Over and above that, Amazon is one of the biggest and most reliable companies on the planet – bigger than any web hosting company. You can trust them to do a good job. Get signed up for it and enjoy the benefits.
