Lesson Four

This video is going to walk you through the signup process for getting your Amazon S3 account. Since S3 is a part of the Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS, to get to the S3 account we need to actually sign up for an AWS account, which if you already have an Amazon.com account, you kind of have access to that anyway but let’s go to the process just to make sure we’re all in the same page.

You will need a credit card or debit card or some type of prepaid credit card type of thing and an email address. The rest of it is pretty much just a straightforward singing up process like you do with just about anything else online, but if you have not signed up for an AWS account or an S3 account before, go ahead and first sign up for the create a free account. This is going to get you a lot of freebies for the first 12 months or at leastways a good chunk of freebies at it tells you here and I kind of touched on this a little bit in the prior video when we talked about the pricing calculator but let’s go ahead and first make sure we’re on the right page, so enter aws.amazon.com in the browser.

Head on over to this page then click on ‘create a free account’ and this gives you a little bit of a rundown here on some of the basics that you’re going to get with this free account. It’s not totally free; it’s just kind of sort of free. With Amazon S3 you’re going to get 5 gigabytes of storage for free and you’re going to get, I think it’s like 50 gigabytes of data transfer, which really is a lot especially if you’re just starting out. If you are a returning Amazon.com user, this is where you would go ahead and put in your login credentials or in our case we are a new user, so you want to enter your email address and then click on ‘sign in using our secure server’ and like I said pretty straightforward stuff. Put in your name, enter the email address again, and then grab your password somewhere.

At this point, I would suggest if you don’t have some type of a password manager, a RoboForm or LastPass, go ahead and create a folder on your desktop somewhere, label it Amazon or AWS or something like that and inside of that folder open up or create a text document so you’ve got all this stuff stashed away somewhere so you’ll have it. And then click on continue and here they’re asking for some more information.

Again pretty standard stuff, just put in all of your information here and then put in the CAPTCHA information here, read over the AWS customer agreement, check that box as long as you agree with all those terms; again pretty standard stuff. Now you can see the little asterisk, these are all going to be required fields and the phone number that you enter here is one you’re going to want to have access to, because you’re going to get a phone call here in a little bit with an identification number that you have to provide them, just so that they know that you’re a human being kind of thing. So we’re going to pause the video while I finish filling all this stuff out.

This tells you a little bit about the free stuff again as I mentioned earlier. You get 5 gigs of storage and a little bit of things like 50 gigabytes of the data transfer out, but here you want to put in your credit card information or your debit card, prepaid card, whatever. I’m going to go ahead and finish filling this out and then you either use your current contact address or a new address here and then click on continue. And here’s where they use that phone number that you had entered earlier and they’re going to give you that pin number.

Let’s go ahead and I’m going to click on ‘call me now’. As you can see they have the pin number issued there on the computer and whenever they call you they’re going to ask you to enter that pin number on the keypad of your phone, and as soon as you do then they’re going to do what you just saw here and that is to identify that you are actually a human being. At this point we want to go ahead and click on ‘continue to select your support plan’.

Really just starting off, the basic free is just fine. You can always comeback at a later point and subscribe to one of these other ones, which as you can see are not free. Let’s go with the basic free one. Click on continue and you get this nice little welcome sign because we are done.

That’s how easy it is to sign up for your Amazon S3 account or as in this case your AWS account which actually includes Amazon S3. Let me show you what all else you’ll get. Click on the launch management console and then enter your login information, make sure that you have here ‘I am a returning user and my password is’ then click on sign in. And here we are. These by the way are all the additional tools included with AWS that you have access to as well as Amazon S3. Go ahead and click on the S3 icon over here on the left and this is the first page that you are greeted with where you can create a bucket. Of course you can do a lot of the stuff right here within your Amazon management console but there are other third party tools that I’m going to be explaining and demonstrating in the upcoming videos.

And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on signing up for your Amazon S3 account. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.