Putting video on your site is as easy as can be with eZs3.

Last year we would groan every time we had to upload a video. Con­se­quently we didn’t load too many because it was a pain…and we con­sider our­selves pretty web savvy. Plus we were con­cerned about all the band­width our videos were using.

Then we dis­cov­ered Ama­zon S3 (Sim­ple Stor­age Ser­vice) which is an online ser­vice pro­vided by Amazon.com, that allows web design­ers to store large amounts of data online.

S3 is free to join, and is a pay-as-you-go ser­vice, mean­ing you only ever pay for any of the host­ing and band­width costs that you use, mak­ing it very attrac­tive for small com­pa­nies such as ours. We just received our bill for last month. It was a whop­ping 81 cents.

The nice thing is there is no limit to the amount of stor­age and band­width you can use on your Ama­zon S3 account, mean­ing it is a fully scal­able to your needs.

Ama­zon has also built the S3 ser­vice to be very reli­able, and guar­an­tees server uptime of 99.99%. This claim is backed up by a ser­vice level agree­ment, whereby the user is enti­tled to a ser­vice credit if the ser­vice ever drops below this guarantee.

But there was still the prob­lem of get­ting the media files onto our website.

Enter eZs3!

eZs3 is a ser­vice which allows you to fully man­age your own S3 account, includ­ing upload­ing and down­load­ing files and fold­ers, and cre­at­ing play­ers and wrap­pers that you can eas­ily use to embed media files on your website.

It is truly what its name implies — EASY! And although it is not free, at $20 a month it is so worth it in time sav­ings alone.

What we like about it:

There is a sim­ple uploader applet which allows you to nav­i­gate through fold­ers on both your local PC, and your host­ing account at Ama­zon S3, and use drag-and-drop to sim­ply trans­fer files between the two.

Since S3 allows you to cre­ate up to 100 indi­vid­ual fold­ers within your account to help organ­ise your files. eZs3 makes it easy to cre­ate these fold­ers, includ­ing choos­ing the location.

When you’ve fin­ished using a file or folder on your S3 account, and are sure that you will no longer need it, eZs3 makes it a straight­for­ward process to delete, so you no longer have to pay for host­ing you do not need.

S3 com­bines inex­pen­sive stor­age with full access con­trol for the files and fold­ers stored on your account. eZs3 allows you to eas­ily mod­ify these access poli­cies giv­ing you com­plete con­trol over who can view your content.

eZs3 allows you to cre­ate play­ers and wrap­pers for you media files, and eas­ily embed them in your web­site using a sim­ple javascript com­mand. eZs3 cur­renty sup­ports Flash FLV Videos, Mp3 Audios, Win­dows Media Videos, Quick­time Movies, Adobe PDF Doc­u­ments, and Cam­ta­sia Stu­dio Productions.

eZs3 tracks how many times your video has been viewed, on any web­site it has been embed­ded on. This allows you to track the pop­u­lar­ity of your videos and make changes to your online mar­ket­ing strat­egy to suit.

It also allows you to quickly iden­tify when­ever some­one else has embed­ded your con­tent on their site, so you can ask them to stop, or open up a whole new busi­ness channel.

Did we also men­tion how easy it makes the process of upload­ing your videos?

We are sold on Ama­zon S3 and eZs3.

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