For the past 4 years or so I’ve been doing well using HipCast.com, thinking it was a great low cost solution to hosting audio and video. With HipCast I can record anything, then minutes later have it hosted on my blog… which is great when you need to move fast.
That was until the other day…
When I received an email from HipCast telling me I had exceeded my bandwidth for the month and was into extra charges! I checked this out and even though on their website it says “unmetered bandwidth” it turns out that for me it’s actually 5GB a month with $1 per extra 1 GB used.
How did I get into this extra cost? Last month I launched a new website BigSellingOptins.com which has a video at the top of the page hosted by HipCast. Because I’ve had lots of traffic arrive there it sent my “unmetered” bandwidth allowance above and beyond my 5GB for that month.
Here’s what I’m now going to do…
Use Amazon S3 online storage service.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
It’s quite tricky to manage the files with this storage service because it doesn’t use regular FTP. So I’m going to use this simple FireFox plugin called S3 Manager (thanks to Terry Dean for telling me about this!)…
http://www.s3fox.net
Now Amazon S3 isn’t free to use like the S3 Manager plugin but it is extremely cheap, here’s what I mean…
Do you remember how I told you that I was paying $1 per extra 1Gb I used over the 5Gb I was allowed by HipCast?
Check this out… Amazon S3 charges: $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out… then the prices go down from there more you use. Using this service is a real no-brainer even if you just need a place to store all your products for your customers to download from.
Right now I’m in the process of moving a few products over to a new ecommerce solution (which I’ll tell you about later). As soon as I’ve moved them over I’ll be setting up an account with Amazon S3 …so they can host my videos.
What’s your video hosting solution costing you?
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Just a quick update on this post…
I’ve set up an account with Amazon S3 and everything is going well. The load time on videos is great! There’s one tip for you when you do what I’ve done… make sure your files on S3 are set to “Everyone”. ]
All you do is select each file ten go to edit “ACL” then put a check next to “everyone” and “read”.
Here’s where I’ve set up my first S3 video…
http://BigSellingOptins.com