Okay guys I’ll try and get this right. Sorry, I just got back from a nice dinner(no, not a “niche” dinner…well kind of) - carne ranchera and some margaritas. Anyhow, if you’re looking for a rock-bottom bargain on private video hosting for membership sites and whatnot Amazon’s S3 service is the way to go.

At my last company I worked in business development. One of the projects I worked on involved online backup and storage. I learned that even many of the big players in that space use Amazon’s S3 to backup huge amounts of data in their data centers. That’s because of the affordability and reliability of S3.

Have a look below at the pricing and you’ll quickly see there’s no hosting or storage even close to what S3 offers for the price:

Fifteen cents per gig on storage wow. That’s fantastic pricing for private video hosting or any other online storage. Not only that but you’ve got 99.999999999 reliability.  Data transfer is Waaayyy cheaper than what your going to get from your hosting company too.

One of the biggest reasons S3 isn’t being used by more for private video hosting is that amazon doesn’t actively market it and it can be unintuitive at first. It’s really user friendly once you use it but getting into it at first can be a chore.

S3 organizes your files in something called “Buckets.” Buckets are essentially the Amazon equivalent of folders or directories. Once you sign up for an account and put your credit card on file you access Amazon s3 as follows:

1. http://aws.amazon.com/
2. Select “Sign in to the AWS Management Console ” and login.
3. Select the tab “Amazon S3.”
4. Select “Create A Bucket.”
5. Give your bucket a name and setup logs if you want log data on  your files in those buckets.
6. Select “Upload Files” and upload your files.
7. Voila! Your files are now in storage but there’s something else you must do.
8. Select your files then select “Properties.” Add “Read” permission to everyone or you nobody will be able to access your files online.
9. Access your files as follows: http://mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com/video.mp4 etc...
10. Optional - If you want, there is a Firefox plugin called “S3fox Organizer” which acts like an FTP client for S3. If you go this option you’ll need to get your security credentials from S3 first. Do this by clicking the “Account” tab here: http://aws.amazon.com/. Then click the “Security Credentials” button and login again.  Once you do this you’ll need your “Access Key ID” and “Secret Access Key.” You’ll enter these in the “Manage Accounts” function of S3 Fox.

Okay, now that we have our low cost private video hosting with Amazon S3 you’ll need a player to play the raw files on your Wordpress blog.  I tried a number of players. One that I first settled on was a paid plugin called “FLVPlugin.” It may have been a good plugin and I used it for a while but then I found a better one and even better…Free!

Now I am using “DOP Player” and I love it; works awesome and looks great. I’ll be posting some private videos here soon using Amazon S3 and DOP Player. So far I am very happy with the test results.

A note about DOP player. First I couldn’t get the videos to show. Here’s what I did that made it work:

1. Unzip the DOP Player folder.
2. Go into /dop-player/dop-player/ and cut or copy the file dop-player.swf
3. Paste dop-player.swf into the /dop-player/folder.
4. All good.

So, if you’re looking for low cost private video hosting you’ve got to checkout S3. and as far as playing videos go and get the DOP Player. The interface is attractive, the plugin is free and customizable from the admin settings.

If you have any thoughts or questions feel free to ask.

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