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I think that it would be nice to add a plugin, even a paid one, that would automatically submit all media to a Amazon s3 bucket. This would give us the ability to add thousands of video clips, without investing in a dedicated server with their expensive storage.
I have played with other stock media scripts that offer this great feature, including a WP plugin called Sell Media S3 by Graph Paper Press. Do you think that plugin would integrate into Symbiostock Express?
worldviewstock.com
Hi Videoopp,
I will look into this feature as some other have mentioned it as well. Thanks for the suggestion. As for Sell Media, I don’t know if Symbiostock Express will work with it as they specialize in their own themes.
I just checked Sell Media S3 and just so you’re aware, it just backs data up to S3 – it does not appear to store it there for live use:
Note: Files will be saved locally as well. Original size images are stored in wp-content/uploads/sell_media and are protected. Thumbnail images are stored in wp-content/uploads/ and have public access.
So that means that S3 serves as a backup for your files, not the live repository with that extension. We’ll look into how we can integrate it with Symbiostock.
I’m glad I found this, as I am looking into how to set up a new site. I had the same question about whether or not Symbiostock would be able to work with S3 or EC2 or any other type of CDN.
Following with interest. Thanks, Videoopp.
I’m looking at amazon S3 pricing – have you guys considered how expensive bandwidth costs are?
Sure, storage for 300gb would be something like $9, but to serve that actual data, you’re looking at $27. That’s a total of $36 for 300gb. You can probably get a VPS for close to that amount of money, which is almost a full server.
And that’s assuming you don’t have a lot of bandwidth usage. If Google crawls you, or Symzio crawls you, or any other search engine does, or someone spiders your site, you’re paying out of pocket for all of that.
In my experience, working with Amazon in other capacities, they are a sneaky company. They like to get you to move your stuff to them for cheap, then charge you an arm and a leg to get your stuff back.
Look at their infrequent costs – say you were to backup a 2tb hard drive there, just in case something crashes:
Initial cost: $25/month – pretty cheap.
Say your hard drive crashes and you need to download all that data. Here is the bandwidth cost:
$180
Not to mention the request costs and who knows what else. IMO, maybe, maybe it can be used as a backup solution. But for real-time media hosting? I wouldn’t dare. I’d be scared every time someone downloads an image from me.
Am I missing something?
Hi Robin,
I just posted a similar topic before I saw this one. It comes down to the question if there is way to store just the hi-rez images somewhere else, and only connect and download that hi-rez image when someone buys that image. So if no one buys an image, no data traffic to that external source.
I agree, Amazon is not an option. It looks tempting at first, but I also read the things you mention and that can get very very costly.
Hey Chris – it’s all possible, but has little to do with Symbiostock on a software level. You wouldn’t want WordPress to manage the connection really as it would be painfully slow and unreliable. The best option would be to do it at the system level – create a directory (or the ss_media directory) and somehow use Linux to point that to the remote server, which I’m sure is possible but likely complex. This would also be probably difficult unless you have your own server. If you do have any WordPress plugins that provide such an interface, it may well be possible, but thus far I don’t see it working for large files reliably.
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