My website (developed with ASP.NET) publishes news along with related JPEG files and flash videos. Right now it is hosted as dedicated server. But it is becoming hard to maintain backup and bandwidth.
Can I host image files, video files and audio files in S3 bucket to resolve my issue? I have seen some articles related to this. But wanted to check with those who already doing this well. Do I need to take care of any steps to do so?
Please suggest me.
Yup, S3 works just fine for this. You need to make your buckets public to do so.
Alternatively, you can use CloudFront on top of S3 - http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/. It's a bit more expensive, but I've had good success with it.
Related
I would like to provide a link on my web site to download a large file. This should be done with scale in mind. What is best efficient way as of today?
Of course i can do a classic way:
<a href="//download.myserver.com/largefile.zip" title="Download via HTTP" >
The problem with this approach is: i dont want traffic to my server to explode with downloads. So I would rather redirect to external hosting for this large file. What is best way to host this file then?
If you want to avoid download traffic to your server, then I personally suggest using Azure Blob Storage. There is lots of documentation and client libraries for .Net. It removes download traffic from your site and the security concerns of hosting files and moves them to the Azure cloud which is very secure to say the least.
If you want the files to be publicly available to anyone, then make a public container, get the url of the file you want and place it in the anchor tag, otherwise you may need to familiarise yourself with the blob leasing (plenty of documentation too). Though like most things it is not free. The silver lining is you only pay for what you use.
You can get started here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-quickstart-blobs-dotnet
Disclaimer,
I do not work for Microsoft, nor I do not benefit form this. This is just a personal opinion based on previous experiences and projects.
I need to build a website that can be downloaded to a CD.
I'd like to use some CMS (wordpress,Kentico, MojoPortal) to setup my site, and then download it to a cd.
There are many program that know how to download a website to a local drive, but how to make the search work is beyond my understanding.
Any idea???
The project is supposed to be an index of Local community services, for communities without proper internet connection.
If you need to make something that can be viewed from a CD, the best approach is to use only HTML.
WordPress, for example, needs Apache and MySQL to run. And although somebody can "install" the website on his own computer if you supply the content via a CD, most of your users will not be knowledgeable enough to do this task.
Assuming you are just after the content of the site .. in general you should be able to find a tool to "crawl" or mirror most sites and create an offline version that can be burned on a CD (for example, using wget).
This will not produce offline versions of application functionality like search or login, so you would need to design your site with those limitations in mind.
For example:
Make sure your site can be fully navigated without JavaScript (most "crawl" tools will discover pages by following links in the html and will have limited or no JavaScript support).
Include some pages which are directory listings of resources on the site (rather than relying on a search).
Possibly implement your search using a client-side technology like JavaScript that would work offline as well.
Use relative html links for images/javascript, and between pages. The tool you use to create the offline version of the site should ideally be able to rewrite/correct internal links for the site, but it would be best to minimise any need to do so.
Another approach you could consider is distributing using a clientside wiki format, such as TiddlyWiki.
Blurb from the TiddlyWiki site:
TiddlyWiki allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext
documents that can be published to a WebServer, sent by email,
stored in a DropBox or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick.
I think you need to clarify what you would like be downloaded to the CD. As Stennie said, you could download the content and anything else you would need to create the site either with a "crawler" or TiddlyWiki, but otherwise I think what you're wanting to develop is actually an application, in which case you would need to do more development than what standard CMS packages would provide. I'm not happy to, but would suggest you look into something like the SalesForce platform. Its a cloud based platform that may facilitate what you're really working towards.
You could create the working CMS on a small web/db server image using VirtualBox and put the virtual disk in a downloadable place. The end user would need the VirtualBox client (free!) and the downloaded virtual disk, but you could configure it to run with minimal effort for the creation, deployment and running phases.
I just wonder what you would suggest me to read an image file from the local directory in my Air application if I only have the native path (eg C:\myImage.jpg) of this image?
Since my grid item renderer needs to read those thumbnail images, the performance is very important for me. I do it with stream now but I m not sure if it is the best way. Any suggestion is highly appreciated.
It is not really clear for me how your application will work but here are two tips for you that I hope will help you somehow:
If you want to have image resources in you Flex/Air app - include them in you applications.
If you want to access local files (only Air app can do it) - read them as binary files - this is fastest way, because you will use lowest-file-access API available in Air.
p.s. Think about pre-populating resources for your item-renderer. Maybe some kind of caching proxy will work for you. Of course you will have to implement it. I didn't see ready to go solutions yet because it is very specific task which is not really hard to implement.
We need to develop an application to sell music online. No need to specify that all will be done quite legally and in so doing, we have to plan an interface to pay artists. However, we are confronted with a question: What is the best way to store music on the server? Should we save it on server's disk from a HTTP fileupload? Should we save via FTP or would it be wiser to save it in the database? No need to say that we need it to be the most safiest as possible. So maybe an https is required here. But, we what you think is the best way? Maybe other idea? Because in all HTTP case, upload songs (for administration) is quite long and boring, but easly linkable to a song that admin create in his web application comparativly to an FTP application to upload song on server and then list directory in admin part to link the correct uploaded song to the song informations in database.
I know that its maybe not quite clear, it's because i'm french but tell me and I will try to explain part that you don't understand.
I've used Krystalware's SlickUpload ASP.NET control in the past to take care of the uploading part for you (you can use the in built control if you want to but this has a lot of the nifty ajax-style features done for you and is quite cheap).
Edit:
[I would not advocate storing the music file itself in the database. Much better [in my humble opinion] only to store the location of the file in the database. If you use one of the cloud services listed below then the location might simply be an HTTP link]
I'd also seriously consider using a cloud storage service for storing the music files. Something like Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. CloudFiles is good because, if you wish, you can also enable CDN delivery (Content Delivery Network) which means your users can access the uploaded music tracks much faster than if served off your local web server, for instance.
Hope this helps,
Richard.
I want to create a WebTV site in ASP.NET. At the moment I am thinking of using Flowplayer, serving .flv files. Since it will work with pseudostreaming, IIS will serve various .flv files in a schedule.
Is there a platform/open source package to provide all the clip (and advertisement) scheduling to create the WebTV program? Or do I need to create my own scheduling interface (backend) that will store the .flv schedule in a database, and create e.g. an .aspx that will read the current time and decide which clip to serve?
Or are there any better ideas?
Thanks in advance!
If you want to act like a broadcast channel where all viewers see the same thing at the same time, then you want to use live streaming using flash media server, or some other streaming server that supports live streaming. I'm not aware of any scheduling packages, but I've never looked for them.
If you want to do more of a video on demand idea like youtube or hulu then you could either build that yourself or look at the many web video publishing platforms, like twistage, etc.
Flowplayer has a bunch of off the shelf ad plugins which could be used, it's just a matter of integrating them yourself. I'm not aware of any all-in-one packages that do everything you are asking for - you'll have to put together the pieces yourself.