This American Life and Amazon Web Services

Peter Burkholder — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:03:00 -0700

Dear Ira Glass and Elizabeth Meister,

Today I was listening to your “This American Life” podcast and the prelude included a fund campaign to support your podcasts. Being a dutiful listener, and more than that, a fan committed enough to attend a live TAL show, I’m going to go beyond making a $5 donation, and help you save $70,000 per year.

Today you said that on average you support 400,000 download of your podcast per week (or 1.73 million a month) at a bandwith cost of $152,000 per year (or $12670 per month). That’s a situation not unlike the one we faced at EchoDitto when Rosie O’Donnell, or most prominent client, had b/w charges going through the roof when her podcasts were in the news last year. Our solution then was to move using media hosting through Amazon’s Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3). Before we get into implementation, let’s look at cost for using S3:

STORAGE and UPLOAD:

Typical podcast size: 28M
Podcast storage for one year’s worth of podcasts (approx. 40 new podcasts per year): 1.1Gb
Monthly cost for 1 year’s podcast storage with S3 (1.1.Gb * $0.15 per GB per month): 16¬¢
Monthly upload costs (10¬¢ per Gb): 1¬¢
Subtotal storage and upload per month: 11¬¢
or, effectively nothing.

DOWNLOAD:

Bandwidth: 400,000 downloads per week of 28Mb podcasts: 10937 Gb/week, or ~50 Tb/Month
Requests: 400,000 * 4.33 : 1,732,000 GETs per month

And here I fall back on the AWS monthly calculator to come up $6912 per month, or $83,000 per year, an annual savings or $69,000

Implementation

Sign up for AWS with your WBEZ credit card
Sign up for S3, and get your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and your AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
Download and install S3Fox for Firefox, and configure S3Fox with the keys from the step above
Use S3Fox to create a bucket called, say, media.thisamericanlife.org
Use S3fox to upload a podcast with an object key, say, ‘podcast/332.mp3’
In DNS, create a CNAME media CNAME media.thisamericanlife.org.s3.amazonaws.com
Link to your podcast at @http://media.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/332.mp3’

That’s it. To learn more read Scalable Media Hosting with Amazon S3

What about streamguys.com?

Continue to use them for streaming. There no reason you can’t split the hosting for your downloadable podcasts vs. your streaming media.

Downsides

I can’t think of any. There’s no upfront cost, no commitment. You could even use it for a handful of your podcasts to make sure your happy. And give everyone on staff a raise!

Ellipsis: Tag aws

This American Life and Amazon Web Services

Dear Ira Glass and Elizabeth Meister,

Implementation

What about streamguys.com?

Downsides