So your client has an idea for a great community website. The site will allow users to share images, flash movies or documents freely with millions of people world wide. You design the site to meet the clients needs, but how do you program a website to scale as the traffic on the site moves from few hundred visitors a week to a few hundred thousand visitors a day.

Enter the Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Via yahoo - A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

With a CDN your client can continue to use a $10/month shared hosting plan. Without a CDN your client would have to purchase and maintain a webfarm to deliver the community website client to end users. For most startups even those with large budgets a CDN is a logical choice. But for small businesses and startups on a shoestring budget (as many are), even a CDN can be cost prohibitive. Alighten has a solution for that too.

Enter Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (AWS S3).

Amazon Web Services Services Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) is a scalable CDN for the rest of us. With AWS your client only pays for the bandwidth they use. This gives your client's startup accounts receivable time to catch up with the startup costs.

AWS S3 Pricing

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer "in" and "out" refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead.

Alighten contract website programmers can build your client's website to utilize the AWS S3. Delivering high content availability worldwide on a shared hosting budget. With Alighten you can safely tell your client that you have solved the content bottle neck. Contact Alighten for a quote today.