Love the Amazon S3 WordPress plugin! Instead of storing all images and file uploads on my web hosting server, I can use my Amazon S3 account to safely and securely store my uploads – all via my WordPress dashboard.
Sweet idea!
Why use Amazon S3 for your WordPress uploads?
There’s two main reasons,
- Reduce the load on your server by offloading static media to Amazon’s content delivery network, with 99.99% availability
- Supports BitTorrent for large media files
So using Amazon S3 saves the load on my web hosting space, thus could help speed up my site and also securely stores my uploads. Most WordPress installs are not setup on secure servers; while you don’t need to use a secure server for your WordPress install, you may very well want a secure server for some of your documents – such as, reports or guides you may offer as downloads.
There are many Amazon S3 tools out there that can be used to access your Amazon S3 buckets; but the convenience of this one being within your WordPress dashboard, where I personally do the majority of my uploads and distributing information, is priceless.
Oh, and did I mention this tool is FREE! 
To YOUR Success,
Traci
P.S. Do you use Amazon S3?
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Thanks again Traci for the direction.
Have you been using it for a while?
What have been your average costs?
Hi Chuck
The plugin itself is free, the only costs are storage fees at Amazon S3, which are ridiculously cheap.
I’ve had an Amazon S3 account for a long time, just never really used it until a couple months ago. Within this past month I have uploaded a TON of information to various buckets within my Amazon S3 account (I’m talking lots and lots of video and files) and I just checked my report and I owe a whopping .40 cents due on July 1st. Seriously – only .40 cents!!
I use automatic backup that works with amazon s3
maybe i will try this plugin too
Hi Giochi – is the automatic backup that works with Amazon S3 a plugin? If so, got a link for that?
Hi Traci! Gary here.
I guess it’s been nearly a year since you first told me about the S3 for FireFox plugin, and that advice helped me tremendously!
I’ve often thought about using Amazon S3 for storing / hosting my images for my WordPress blogs but … this is the first time I’ve heard of an S3 plugin for WordPress. Once again you’ve surprised me with some great info when I wasn’t even asking! How do you read my mind like that?
Thanks Traci!
Gary Anderson
aka- GanderCo
Will this plugin allow you to upload files to your WordPress server as well as to S3? I like to keep a copy of all media files in the WordPress hierarchy so if there are any downtime issues with S3 or if I switch CDN providers I can fall back on self-hosted files.
Yes, using the Amazon S3 plugin will directly upload to your Amazon S3 account. There’s a new icon in the upload/insert area above where you write your post/page for S3 – click that to upload your content and it goes directly into the S3 bucket on your account that you indicated in the Amazon S3 plugin settings.
Please let me know what is the most recent version of WP that this will work on.
Thanks
Just an FYI, Amazon S3 is not a CDN. You have to activate Amazons CloudFront to use their content delivery network.
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
RAS