We have been using Amazon S3 storage (Simple Storage Solution) for a while now at the CAFE. This is how we deliver our digital files. It’s a low cost way of storing and transferring large files. It’s also scalable, so if tons of people hit it at once, it’s able to keep delivering, where a server, or Virtual server might crash.

I recently announced a free Photoshop, Layer Blend Modes ebook and put it on our S3 for people to download.

Then the question arose, how many people have downloaded it? You would think this would be pretty simple to log into Amazon and view the stats. Nope, there are none! I stumbled around and figured out how to enable logs, which saves a list of every single download. Then all you need to do is open them up and manually count them. My ebook was downloaded 60,000 times in the first few days. I didn’t figure that out by counting the log files! I discovered S3stat which allows you to connect your S3 account and then it gives you normal, simple, human readable logs, by reading those log files for you. Check it out here for 3Sstat.