A few days ago, a friend of mine reached out asking for a good solution for securely transferring a relatively large (~1GB) file to several of her prospective clients. Strangely, even in 2013 the options for transferring such a large file in a reliable manner is pretty limited. I looked into services like YouSendIt, WeTransfer, and SendThisFile but they all suffer from similar limitations. Most of them have a <1GB file size limit, their payment plans are monthly subscription based instead of pay as you go, and they don’t offer custom domains or access control. Apart from these services, there is also the trusty old school option of using an FTP server but that raises the issue of having to maintain your own FTP server, using a non-intuitive FTP client, and still being locked into paying a monthly fee instead of “pay as you go". Stepping back and looking at the issue from a different angle, it then became clear that the S3 component of Amazon’s Web Service offering is actually an ideal solution for this problem. The S3 piece of AWS is basically a flexible “cloud based” storage solution that lets you programmatically upload files, store them indefinitely, and then serve them as you please. Looking at the issues we’re trying to overcome, S3 satisfies all of them out of the box. S3 has a single file size limit of 5 Terabytes, files can be served off a custom domain like archives.setfive.com, billing is pay as you go depending on the resources you use, and S3 supports access control so you have fine grained access over who can download files and for how long. So how do you actually use S3?
Anyway, thats a quick rundown of how to use Amazon’s S3 service for file transfers. The pricing is also *very* cheap compared to traditional “large file transfer” services.
Check out some other useful links about S3:
Posted In: Amazon AWS, Tips n' Tricks