This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.

Amazon S3 is a cheap and cost effective way to scale your site to easily handle large spikes in traffic (such as from Digg) without having to go through the expense of setting up the infrastructure for a content delivery network. Startup companies are embracing it for their online storage solution, and even bloggers are starting to use it to host their images and other static media (such as mp3 files for their podcasts).

Pricing is really cheap. There are no setup fees, no minimum costs, and you literally only pay for what you use, even if it’s just a couple cents a month. If you have a WordPress powered blog, and have a lot of media (such as images or mp3s), this plugin will help you easily utilize Amazon S3 for bandwidth and storage.

Once setup, this plugin transparently integrates with your WordPress blog. File uploads are automatically saved into your Amazon S3 bucket without any extra steps. Once saved, these files will be delivered by Amazon S3, instead of your web host. Any image thumbnails that get created are saved to Amazon S3 too. You’ll also find an “Amazon S3″ tab next to your regular “Upload” tab, which allows you to easily browse and manage files that were not upload via WordPress.

Author: Joe Tan (joetan54@gmail.com)
License: GPL

Requirements:

• A WordPress powered blog hosted on your own server.
• An Amazon S3 account (there are no setup or monthly fees if you want to just try it out).
• PHP 5

Features:

• Easily browse Amazon S3 hosted files, upload new files, and create new folders without having to leave the WordPress edit screen.
• All your WordPress uploads are transparently saved into Amazon S3 for storage and delivery.
• Infinitely scalable with no limits, use Amazon S3 to store as many files as you want.
• Reduce the load on your server by offloading static media to Amazon’s content delivery network, with 99.99% availability.
• Supports BitTorrent for large media files.
• Supports virtual host names (eg: sub.example.com). See Amazon’s notes for more information.
• Supports WordPress MU setups. Can be configured to automatically install and use one common Amazon S3 account for all blogs.

Installation:

1. Download and unzip the plugin.
2. Upload the entire “tantan” directory to the WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Login to your WordPress admin, click “Plugins”, and then activate the “Amazon S3 for WordPress” plugin.
4. Click “Options”, then “Amazon S3″ to bring up the configuration screen.
5. Enter your AWS Access Identifiers to authenticate and link up the plugin with your Amazon account.
6. Select an existing bucket, or create a new bucket. A bucket can be named whatever you want, but must be globally unique. If you want to use virtual hosting, enter in a subdomain as the bucket name and update your DNS settings. More info >
7. Click “Save” and you’re done! You’ll now see an “Amazon S3″ tab next to your “Upload” tab in the WordPress edit screens.
8. Bonus: Enable the”TanTanNoodles Version Checker” plugin to automatically get notified of when updates to this plugin are available.

Download the plugin

Want more WordPress goodness? Check out some of my other plugins and scripts >