Cheap, fast internet storage

May 27, 2010

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an internet solutions company seperate from, but owned by the well known parent company, Amazon.com. AWS offers several products and services, one of which is secure, online data storage. Their prices are amazing low, 15 cents for each Gigabyte. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to setup AWS Simple Storage Service (S3).

If you host with Ocean Tara and you don’t have the time or inclination to do this work yourself, for a small fee we will set up all of these services. Please contact us to have us complete this work for you.

Setup up an account on AWS at http://aws.amazon.com. If you already have an account with amazon.com, you will be able to use the same username, email, password and billing information.
Setup S3 by confirming clicking on the “Sign Up for Amazon S3″ button at http://aws.amazon.com.
Find your security credentials by navigating from the menu to Your Account > Security Credentials.
In a safe place, make note of your Access Key ID which is a series of upper case characters found under the Access Credentials subsection on the page.
Again in a safe place, make note of your Secret Key. This is found by clicking the link “Show” under the Access Credentials subsection.
Now to access your new S3 storage, install the Firefox S3 Plugin, by clicking on Add to Firefox button at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247 (Note: if you do not have Firefox, please install it at: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/ )
Once your Firefox S3 Plugin has been installed, open the S3 Organizer by clicking Tools > S3 Organizer.
Click the “Manage Accounts” button and enter in your Access Key ID and Secret Key and click Save.
You can now use the Organizer to create folders (or “buckets” as called in S3) and upload documents, audio, video and other data to store.