Amazon S3

Creek requires an S3 account for storing media.

What is S3?

S3 is like Dropbox for websites and web developers. For radio stations, it is a flexible, affordable storage solution for their media collections and audio archives.

Why S3?

• S3 provides the most flexibility for where and how your files are stored. You can access the files using FTP-like programs. (But only if you need to mass-download your files. Otherwise, you should always upload or delete files through the Creek control panel.)
• The files are in your own account, under your own name, rather than at a server owned by Creek.
• Amazon S3 provides amazing uptime and reliability.
• It's inexpensive. $0.03 per GB per month. See Amazon S3 pricing.
• It gives you essentially unlimited storage.
• Copyrighted content is not stored on Creek web servers.

Creating an S3 account

• Visit Amazon Web Services and create a free account. It will include 5gb of storage for free.

Tutorial video

(Credit: Video by Michael Saelee.)

Tip: Amazon's Oregon S3 location costs less!

Last we checked, Amazon's Oregon data center location for S3 is a bit cheaper than the others — check out Amazon's S3 pricing.

Example IAM User Policy

When setting up your S3 account, you can use this example policy to make the S3 user more strict and secure. It will only has access to your one bucket, rather than your entire Amazon Web Services account.

Make sure to replace name-of-bucket with the actual bucket name.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "Stmt1425106458000",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "s3:*"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::name-of-bucket/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Usage Alerts Recommended

It is extremely recommended that you set up usage alerts. These will tell you when AWS crosses a certain amount of cost per month, like $30.00.

If the API key for AWS is ever misplaced or stolen, then a malicious user or bot could use this API key to use excessive resources on AWS, which would then be billed to your account.

Amazon often forgives special cases of abnormally high usage bills if you call them and ask, but it is of course better to prevent this in the first place.