s3 Amazon Web Services is my new dedicated hosting of choice for dedicated static image hosting and other media, assets and static hosting.

Some people have complained about speed outside of the US but so far I’ve noticed no difference. I’m migrating the images to here for all my sites.

It’s super cheap. Powerful and you pay for only what you use.

It’s best that you create a subdomain on whatever the domain is your hosting images for and cname it to your s3 account.

The reason for this is corporate firewalls are now blocking sites with images hosted at photobucket or on separate domains and I want to give users every opportunity to waste time on my sites at work.

In case you haven’t heard s3 storage is part of amazons new amazon web services offering where you get to use their $2 billion dollar clustered super computer for various applications.

People like Shelley Powers and David Winer are using it.

Its good for my sites at the moment which need to handle around 50,000 - 100,000 image views per day.

But for bigger stuff you need to look at alternatives.

I’m happy with this for now. Looking at some upload apps in Rails or Python but at the moment I’m just using the S3 Organizer for Firefox.