Need fast and plentiful hosting/storage. Amazon S3?

[fuzzybabybunny]

I'm looking for some cheap storage and bandwidth to host large files for downloading. I checked out Amazon.

I want:

1. Ability to easily upload to the server via FTP - this seems to be a feature that Amazon S3 does not have

2. Ability to download the file at my max bandwidth - I don't know how fast S3 is.

Any other options? Since these are huge files, like 4GB+, I need about 20GB of storage and need to download from it very quickly.

 

[DaveSimmons]

CrossFTP makes Amazon S3 storage look like a FTP server:
http://www.crossftp.com/

If it matters, after uploading you can mark the file as public, after that it can be downloaded by anyone using a browser like Firefox, so the downloader does not need to have your secret keys.

I haven't done any speed tests lately, but we've used it at work for sharing 4+ GB virtual machine images between sites and it worked well for that.

To make S3 look like Windows Explorer, use Bucket Explorer:
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/

 

[KLin]

Agree with Dave. There really is no reason to use FTP when you can setup cloud drives to look like a drive in windows.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I think I got it.

I have Amazon S3 + Amazon CloudFront which significantly speeds up downloads and even allows streaming.

Download speeds were 2MB/s. Uploads were maxed out on my end at 500KB/s. Streaming 1080p video was fine. Hosting is pretty cheap I hear. I used the free CloudBerry Explorer with my S3.