When it comes to storage, there are a bunch of options to choose from and price becomes the main factor in making a decision.

Google

Google charges $1.99 per month for 100GB. That is a lot of space.

Uploading is pretty easy – create folders and simply drag and drop 🙂

There are a bunch of options to share the file, but has to be done at the file or folder level. Not too bad.

Playing a media file from Google drive is a not smooth experience. Even for a shared file, playing a mp3 file (browser based access) is jarring; if the file exceed some size, it refuses to play and suggests that it be downloaded.

Including the media file on a page like on this page is quite an odd experience too; even if I add the link as a media link, it appears as a link and not as a media player. One would have to download the file in order to play the file instead of being able to stream the data and play it.

Amazon Cloud

They have storage option called S3 for which they charge 3 cents per GB per month and probably based on actual usage and also number of requests etc. But they also give the first 5GB free.

One needs to understand their model of buckets and folders, because each file has a unique URL for which access rights can be defined. And uploading is complicated if the AWS portal is used. I found a windows application that can browser and upload files to S3 – pretty intuitive and as easy to create folders and drag/drop files.

Including the media file on a page like this is a breeze too. All I have to do is to add a media control in the page and supply the url to the media file. And it appears as a media player as you have seen in the pages I have already set up. 🙂 🙂

Decision

The obvious choice is Amazon Cloud. As I keep pushing my recordings to the cloud I will have to monitor the actual cost of maintaining the recordings on a monthly basis. Will have a good idea at the end of December.