How S3 Stat helped us help you…

Amazon S3 is the beginning… Many of you know that we store the data for our website, downloads of our software, and resources for you (like free media) on our Amazon S3 account. We’ve found it to be the most stable, durable, and lowest rate of failure and the cost is typically cheaper than other options out there. Even with the downtime that occurred last year and took out many popular websites, we’ve consistently been pleased with Amazon’s S3 Service. BUT, one thing was missing…

Where are the stats?

We found very quickly that any information we wanted to try and gather about how many times a file has been downloaded or what bucket is costing us the most could not easily be found. In fact, it wasn’t even possible to gather this. We had no idea how many times users had downloaded a particular Bible into MediaShout worship software or what media was the most popular because we had no stats. Amazon S3 doesn’t provide any user-friendly way to find this information (unless you are good at coding). So, we had to find a solution…

Enter S3 Stat…

We found S3 Stat through a Google Search and quickly realized how powerful it could be for us. Just putting in a 30-day trial of the stat tracking software was simple and they had a great step-by-step tutorial for configuring. Within the first day of tracking, we could easily see some stats that we weren’t even aware of. Within one week, we had a pretty good feel for which buckets were being hit the most. And near the end of the 30-day trial, we can easily tell you which Bibles are the most downloaded and which media packs you guys like the most. It is utterly amazing. This immediately helped us to know how to best provide content to you as users. It also helped us ask questions like, “Are we giving our users the best and easiest access to our resources and software?” Oh, and there are charts to help you visually see the data. As a math guy, I loved the information that I never even knew how to access before. The only wish I have (which is completely unreasonable) is that I could go back in time and implement this from the first day we set up our S3 Account.

So, how does this help me???

If your church hosts media files (sermon videos, audio, etc.) and you find yourself running out of space on your current provider OR your website has a lot of media to it that your current provider struggles to display in a timely manner, then let me recommend you check out Amazon S3 for hosting those files. You can still use your current provider, but link to the file locations on S3 for your media. BUT, if you use S3 for anything, let me recommend you get S3 Stat to go with your Amazon S3 account. Take my advice, it will be worth knowing what your traffic and downloads are accessing. Wouldn’t you like to know which sermon series was the most popular? Or which event flyer PDF is being downloaded the most? Use Amazon S3 + S3 Stat to get the most out of your media.