the webthinking blog

I have too keep this numbers handy… Awesome! Via Chris Penn.

My Premium podcast feed is the very latest innovation brought to you by iSPINIT! Available as a personal RSS feed, it brings flexibility and convenience to a whole new level.

Once your PayPal payment is approved, simply subscribe to your feed in iTunes and automatically receive all Premium podcasts that you have chosen to purchase individually – no monthly fees.

If you like the music we play on the regular podcast, you can enjoy it in a premium version, free of commercials and other talk. Pay only for episodes that you like to build your collection on. It costs less than a Tall Caramel Macchiato, but it’s premium quality!

iSPINIT.com Premium is a chapterized AAC/M4A enhanced podcast – artist/song info being displayed for each tune. All previous episodes are available as premium content.

Give it a spin @ http://iSPINIT.com/premium/

If you are looking for a podcast hosting service, this might interest you… And you might be familiar with Libsyn.com just as well. BTW: if you are using it, you might pay more than you need to…

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in – S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket – e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!