Enterprise Image Hosting - Hosting your own images

If you would like to self-host your images, we can make that happen using the low cost Amazon S3 service.

The cost of Amazon S3 is very, very low (3 cents or less per gigabyte per month, so 100GB of image storage would be approximately $3/month), and you even get a decent amount of storage for free for the first year after initial signup.

Benefits of this approach include:

• FTP image uploads (well, not specifically FTP, but close)
• Use of branded assets domain name
• Unlimited Storage

1. Determine what you would like to call your image hosting host and create a CNAME pointing to either aws_bucket.s3.amazonaws.com (if using normal Amazon S3 storage) or aws_distribution.cloudfront.net (if using Cloudfront CDN distribution through Amazon). For the purposes of this document, we'll call your image hosting host images.mydomain.com.
2. Sign up for Amazon AWS (http://aws.amazon.com)
3. Once you have finished signing up you should see the following:
   

   

   
   

4. Click on "Sign in to the Console" and log in using the credentials you created during the signup process.

5. When you reach the main Amazon Web Services Menu, click on the Services menu at the top and select IAM from the list of available services.

6. When the IAM screen appears, select Users from the left hand navigation menu.
   
   

   

   
   

7. Click on the "Create New Users" button at the top of the screen.
   
   

   

   
   

8. Create a new user. The username can be whatever you want, or "suredone". Then click on "Create" at the bottom of the screen.
   
   

   

   
   

9. On the resulting page, click on "Show Security Credentials". Write down, or copy and paste into a secure location, the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. You'll need to provide these to SureDone.
   IMPORTANT: YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO RETRIEVE THE SECRET ACCESS KEY AGAIN SO MAKE SURE YOU WRITE IT DOWN OR SAVE IT SOMEWHERE NOW
   
   

   

   
   

10. Click on "Close" at the bottom of the screen.

11. Click on the user you just created and then click on "Permissions"
    
    

    

    
    

12. Click on "Inline Policies" and then "Click here" to create a new inline policy.
    
    

    

13. Click on "Select" next to "Policy Generator".

14. On the Edit Permissions Page enter the following. Change images.mydomain.com to the image host you created in step 1.
    Effect: Allow
    AWS Service: Amazon S3
    Actions: All Actions (Click on "No Actions Selected" and choose "All Actions")
    ARN (include quotes): arn:aws:s3:::images.mydomain.com/*
    
    

    

    
    

15. Click on "Add Statement".

16. Click on "Next Step" at the bottom of the page.

17. It will now show a "text version" of the automatically created policy. Go ahead and click "Apply Policy".
    
    

    

    
    

18. Click on "Services" in the top menu and select "S3".

19. Click on "Create Bucket"
    
    

    

    
    

20. The bucket should be named the image host name you chose in step 1 i.e. images.mydomain.com.  Also, change the region to "US Standard".
    
    

    

    
    

21. Click on "Create".

22. You'll be brought to a screen showing the bucket. On the right hand side will be a list of properties.

23. Click on "Versioning" and "Enable Versioning". This is not required but recommended. 

    

    
    

24. If you want SureDone to be able to copy assets to your new bucket, you need to grant all permissions to our user ID. Click on Permissions and then click on "Add more permissions". Use the following information:
    Grantee: d914d5cf140a0dd65eddb9a55f4988b70bf94b6ac9e2c8b8f06660e7e60c3d86
    List: Checked
    Upload/Delete: Checked
    View Permissions: Checked
    Edit Permissions: Checked
    
    

    

    
    

25. Click on "Save".

26. If you'd like to use the Cloudfront content delivery network (CDN) to speed up access to your images (recommended, but there's a slight additional cost), click on "Services" in the top menu and select "Cloudfront". Otherwise, skip to step 33.

27. Click on "Services" in the top menu and select "Cloudfront".

28. Click on "Create Distibution" on the first Cloudfront page.

29. Create a "Web Distribution" by clicking on "Get Started" under "Web".

30. Start typing in the name of your bucket (i.e. images.mydomain.com). It will show you the S3 buckets available. Pick the one that corresponds to your bucket. Once it has been selected, Amazon will pre-populate many of the fields with the correct information.
    
    

    

    
    
    
    

31. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on "Create Distribution" (you may change other parameters, but we will not review non-default parameters in this guide).

32. On the resulting page, enlarge the domain name column and make a note of the domain name you have been assigned. You will need to provide this to SureDone. You will also need to provide the "ID".
    
    

    

33. You can now download an S3 client access utility to access your S3 bucket via Windows or Mac. An example of a free solution is CyberDuck (https://cyberduck.io/)

34. After following step 35 below, SureDone engineering will copy all of your existing assets into your new S3 bucket.

35. After all the files have been transferred, open a support ticket with SureDone at http://support.suredone.com. Make the subject "Enterprise Storage Configuration" and include the following information (and label it so we know what is what):
    Access Key
    Secret Key
    Region (If it's not US Standard)
    Your Bucket Name
    If you signed up for CloudFront, the ID and Domain Name

36. SureDone will configure your account and we'll let you know when things are all done. Until you receive notice that the configuration is complete, make sure all new images are added to your bucket.