Lesson One

Hello and welcome to the S3 Hosting For Beginners Video Course. You’ve made a smart choice
on the siding to get access to this course so that you can begin to setup your Amazon S3
account and begin to upload big video files, audio files or even images, or any file that you want
to upload to your account and save a lot of money. So my goal and the purpose of this video
course is to get you to that point. So I am going to keep this simple, straightforward and to the
point. So first things first what I want to do now is give you a quick overview of the video course so
you know exactly what to expect. In that way you will see the step by step process and you will
be able to implement it at a faster rate. So obviously this is Video #1 which is the 1introduction
and Quick Overview. Video #2, I am going to talk about Calculating Your Costs. It’s good to have an idea of your
numbers and potential budgeting so you that you can kind of put money aside for your monthly
and yearly budget. Now I will say with Amazon S3 you are going to save a lot of money. In fact
when we took the move from a dedicated $300 per month server to Amazon S3, we now pay
about $30 a month and we are utilizing a good amount of bandwidth, which you will see more
in Video #2, which is going to be an eye opening experience. So in Video #3 we are going to talk about What You Need. So there are few things you need
before you can get started. Video #4, we will talk about the Recommended Softwares and Why. Video #5, we will Connect to S3, utilizing those softwares. We will create Buckets and Folders in Video #6. Video #7 is going to be about protecting your Amazon bucket by Preventing Unauthorized
Access. So a lot of people are unaware of this but they create an Amazon bucket, they set
everything up on their download page and people begin to download the files. That’s great in
all but people forget to protect the bucket, so what ends up happening is people share those
links. Or they put it on their own site and then guess what, they are utilizing the bandwidth thatyou have to pay for. So this is a very important step and I am going to show you how to do it
right. Video #8, we are going to talk about Transferring Files from the PC or your Mac to your Amazon
S3 account. And of course last but not least, Video #9, we are going to talk about Getting the URL to Each
File. So this is crucial, especially when you begin to build out your download pages. You need to
have the direct link, right?
So what I want to do right now is just to create a flow chart so that you can visually see what is
happening as far as integrating your existing web hosting account with Amazon S3. So I want to
make sure that you understand that you are not replacing your web hosting account, but rather
what you can do is you can size it down while using Amazon S3. So right now you have a web hosting account, right? And some of you could be paying $10, $20
a month, you could have your virtual private server and you could be paying a $130 a month. Or
you could have your dedicated server and eventually hit that $200 to $300 per month. Now by
using Amazon S3, what it does is it alleviates the burden of having to host tons of heavy duty
files, like video files, audio files and images. So what ends up happening is yes, your web
hosting account works now and you could be paying a low fee, but overtime what’s going to
happen is, as your company grows or as your website grows you will get more and more visitors, right? So the more visitors you get the heavier of the burden it has on that particular
webhosting account or server. And then what will happen is the web hosting company just ask
you to, they will say something like well you are maxing out your account so you are going to
need to upgrade to the next level, the next level and ultimately you are going to find yourself
paying for a dedicated server. Now what Amazon S3 allows you to do is, is allows you to grow on a long term basis without
having that burden. So you can essentially get a cheap virtual private server for $25 and host
your domain here. And then place all the images, videos, audio files or just big files that people
are going to download or utilize your bandwidth. And you can place some on the Amazon S3
account.So what that does is it alleviates you from having to actually step up to the next level, to the
next level, and so forth. So actually what happened was we had a dedicated server and we
actually moved down to a cheap $50 per month virtual private server. So now what we do is we
use that as a virtual private server, meaning that what other people do does not impact out
actual account. So now we have a cheap web hosting account and we link the images, the videos, the audio and
the big files over here because with Amazon, what’s nice about this is you could have
thousands of people per day accessing the Amazon S3 servers and it’s not going to faze them,
it’s not going to crash your account or anything. The people that are visiting here, they are
going to just go to your basic yourdomain.com, they might be visiting your WordPress site, but
all the images and videos and everything are over here. Now you could put the images here and
just stick the big videos, audios or big files over here. That’s something that we did during product launches for example, is we found that a spike of
traffic can crash your whole server. By placing, before Amazon S3 was available, we would place
the images, videos, audios and big files on a different server, and that’s how we would combat
this whole situation. So I just want to make that clear, that you understand that this doesn’t necessarily replace this. You still have the web hosting account, you still have WordPress on this account, you can still
have images, but the whole goal is to alleviate that burden, alright?
So now that you understand how it works let’s move on to the next videos and I am going to
show you how to actually get this done. So with that said, let’s just jump straight in and go into Video #2 and we will talk about
Calculating Your Costs, so you know exactly what to put aside as far as your budget