Question

I am a freelance web-developer, just starting out. In recent past, my project works have been very high (all of a sudden). At the moment I have a very basic hosting package. So this increase in project volume (and files, as well) cannot be handled by the current hosting package. So before I go for another (probably expensive) hosting package, I was weighing my options. I have an Amazon S3 account. I want to host the project files there without changing the codes. Let me explain. Let us say, I have an /uploads dir in my project directory and I want to host all the contents of /uploads to amazon s3. But I don’t want to change the codes and all. So, actually, I want to route all requests to /uploads to s3. Is that possible at all? Searched google for an hour but no luck. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

So re-route: http://yoursite.com/uploads/somefile.txt from your personal host to your S3 bucket http://<bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com/somefile.txt?

Sure you could use Apache mod-rewrite (to redirect – the bucket URL would show in the address bar but your links would work without changes) or mod-proxy (the data would be served from the bucket through your web server – will consume web-server bandwidth but will be invisible to end users- they’ll never see the AWS bucket info).

You need to have access to those modules though, it sounds a bit like you’re in a shared hosting plan in which case you’re at the mercy of the provider (although mod-rewrite is probably already enabled).

Alternatively shop around for another provider, especially in the “virtual private server” or “slice” server market… most of them provide large amounts of storage at reasonable prices (S3 can get pricey)