S3 Analytics

Syndication

This post was orignally posted on Tumblr on the blog: Nerd Ramblings. View the full syndicated blog or view the original post.

Recently I have been working on a new project and when it came to making the website I decided to move away from my regular web host and try out Amazon Web Service’s S3. Part of the project is hosting files for audience members to download, the links must be direct and cannot contain a redirect. They must also be served over https, another reason why I decided to go with S3. 

I want to track the download counts of these files and look at analysts to investigate the usage of these files. S3 doesn’t provide this natively in the console and I can’t use Google Analytics because the files are direct. I noticed that S3 does have logging, but this creates unwieldy log files. 

There are a number of companies that offer services to read these log files and provide useful analytics. One such company is S3Stat. I have been using them for a couple weeks so far, and they have executed perfectly. Works great from my iPad which I am constantly working on abroad. And the main use case that I wanted analytics for, S3Stat delivers. 

Pricing starts at $10 a month, or you can write a blog post not to dissimilar from this one and get access for free. Under their extremely generous Cheap Bastard Plans. Even for the $10 a month this is an extremely polished service and I would really recommend you try them out.