Getting Ready For Amazon S3

I've been considering using's Amazon S3 for a while now. I think of the S3 service as an inexpensive content delivery network that can reduce the over all load on my servers, while improving overall site performance. My main interest is in uploading static content files like css, javascript and images.



By uploading those page objects to Amazon's S3, my web server can simply focus on rendering php pages, and not worry about serving images and other static content. I expect the modest expense to pay for itself in the additional capacity that each single server can offer. This will reduce datacenter equipment expenses, and administration time, so I'm all for it.

I like the idea that I can manage an S3 account via a plugin in my browser. I've been using Amazon's Ec2 and I manage it the same way, right from my browser.

My Experience With Windows on Amazon's EC2

Being a developer of websites for Amazon Associates, I've long been an advocate of Amazon Web Services. Recently, I decided to give Ec2 for Windows a try. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux web servers for all my business servers, but I had a computing task that I thought Windows on Ec2 would be well suited for.

During my normal website marketing activities, I typically will build a very large Google Site maps, XML files with 40,000 urls, and anywhere from 5-22 per site. To do this, I run a website crawling application which pulls 15 urls every 4 seconds. Now my server is a dual quad core processor, capable of serving hundreds of pages per second.

The problem:
1. Building my site maps quickly to get my new websites indexed quickly, and to let Google know some of the deeper pages of site content.
2. Making use of my server's capability.
3. Not run the crawling application on my desktop

My Solution:
1. Run multiple instances of my crawler on various Windows via Amazon Ec2.
2. Launched 5 instances, quickly and easily right from my browser.

What I discovered? The new cloud computing model is going to make another revolution in computing that I don't yet believe has been fully appreciated. I envision that companies such as Adobe may offer their applications more affordably via Amazon Ec2 amis or computer images (think Norton Ghost). This will create new sales channels for software vendors, and possibly bring more of a user base for their applications.

Online Shopping Mashup

After making several cool enhancements to the site, I thought I'd mention my new online shopping mashup OrderItOnTheWeb.com. It's a mix of Amazon Web Services, Yahoo! Web Services, Yahoo! Pipes and Google Maps Api. All of the data gets mixed and reorganized with a little ajax, php and some help from my good friends at mint graphics.

This site will be great for those people who want to not only order online, but find the items they are interested, in a local store near them, how cool is that. Anyway, the site is still in being developed on an ongoing basis. I'd appreciate any feedback you'd like to leave about the site, it's really help out.

If you want to follow the progress of the site, you can always check back here on my tech blog, or just go to the OrderItOnTheWeb.com Blog. I'll post more later.