Girlebooks.com was one of the first sites I set up in WordPress. The site is not only a hobby for me but also a great playground to see what I can do with WordPress. It also is a great site to point prospective clients to when they want to see examples of what we’ve done with WordPress.
The site’s main focus is hosting free ebooks. Since we have our own hosting space for our web development work, I have been using the extra space on that account for Girlebooks. Lately, due the the increasing popularity of the site, Girlebooks has been hogging all of our extra bandwidth and disc space so that we have none left for hosting new clients or upgrading existing accounts. It was either buy more space on our hosting account or seek out an alternative for Girlebooks’ growing needs.
Amazon S3 is an extremely cheap solution for hosting files, and its pay-as-you-go pricing model means you’re never paying for space or bandwidth you don’t use, and you never will run out of space and freeze up your site. Great! That sounds like the perfect solution, right? Unfortunately there is currently no web-based interface for transferring files to their system–it’s only accessible through SOAP and REST APIs. Since I’m not familiar with SOAP or REST, I’m out of luck.
Come to the rescue S3Fox which I discovered thanks to this article at CodingHorror.com (which has a much better tutorial on using S3Fox than I have here). Once installed as a Firefox add-on, S3Fox appears just like an FTP program, with your local files on the left, your S3 files on the right. Create your “buckets” on S3 to host the files, upload, and set permissions. Then link to your S3 Files from your website. The download manager plugin I use for Girlebooks, Drain Hole, has built-in support for S3 hosted files.
It worked flawlessly. I haven’t set up all the ebooks this way yet, but you can already see the results with our most popular ebook on the site, Pride and Prejudice.