AWS S3 & CloudFront Video Hosting  Fees Calculator

Check out the calculator below that we've created (embedded, live Google Sheet).

It is meant to give you a rough estimate about video hosting costs, both in terms of storage as well as usage. There are some tiny additional charges that have been left out in order to make the calculations a bit simpler. But it's not going to be far too different from what is shown in the calculator.

Pricing Calculator Embedded Google Sheet

Download the Google Sheet Calculator here: S3 & CloudFront Video Hosting Price Calculator. You won't be able to edit it directly on Google Sheets website, but you can download a copy, and then modify it to match your own numbers from your membership site or online course.

That should give you a pretty good idea as to what your own video hosting costs will be.

Also check out this more detailed article about How To Reduce S3 and CloudFront Video Hosting Costs.

If you're read the article How and Why to use Amazon S3 to Deliver Audio, Video and PDF on your WordPress website, you already know that using S3 to securely deliver members-only content is the best option for you as a course creator or membership site owner.

But because of Amazon Web Services's (AWS) pricing structure, it can be pretty confusing and complicated to figure out how much your AWS bill is going to be (S3, CloudFront, storage, usage, encoding, etc.).

And that's why we've created a spreadsheet (further below) that can will you a rough idea of what to expect in video hosting costs.

Here are some tips on how to reduce video hosting costs:

1) Use Streaming Videos (Instead of Standard Videos)

Very little bandwidth is wasted with Streaming videos, because the video is downloaded only as far as your members/viewers continue to watch them. But with Standard videos, even if they watch for a few seconds, the entire video is fully downloaded to their browser.

E.g., you have a 10-minute long video that is 50 MB in size. If you deliver it as Streaming video, and your member only watches 2 minutes, then only 2 minutes worth of video is delivered. So, AWS will only charge you for 2 minutes worth of data transfer.

However, if you deliver the same video as a Standard video (which is also secure, by the way), then as soon as the viewer hits play, the video starts downloading to the user's browser (temp folder). So whether they watch 5 seconds or 5 minutes, the entire 10-minute video is downloaded to their browser (even if they hit pause after watching just 5 seconds and never watch the rest of the video).

Some of the types of videos published on a website, are:

• Sales videos
• Content Marketing videos
• Live videos
• Documentation, Tutorial and How-to videos

These can be Public (anyone who visits a public page on your website can see it) or Private (members-only videos that are reserved for members who have either registered for free, or have paid for your online course (one-time or subscription).

What you need to know about creating and hosting your own Podcast Feed using WordPress and web host.

• What does it mean to host your podcast on WordPress?
• Should you host your podcast feed on your own website?
• How to create the Podcast RSS feed?
• What about the audio files? Where should you host it?

That's what I discuss in this post, which you can also listen to, using the audio player above.