10th
April
2006
How I’m using Amazon S3 to serve media files
“As traffic to chicagocrime.org has steadily increased, I’ve been looking for ways to tweak the site’s performance. The site runs on a rented dedicated server with Apache/mod_python, PostgreSQL and Django… One thing that’s always bugged me is that chicagocrime.org’s Apache instance serves both the dynamic, Django-powered pages and static media files such as the CSS and images. It’s inefficient for a single Apache instance to act as both an application server (mod_python) and a media server… The solution hit me the other day — I can just use Amazon’s new Amazon S3 data-storage service to host chicagocrime.org’s media files, so my own Apache server can focus on serving dynamic pages.”