....marke it as solved - just found the documentation. Hopefully it works

Hi Mark,

yes you are right - thanks for the link!

You are most welcome

I would like to chime in here and state that serving files from S3 is NOT ideal. S3 is a storage medium, not a content delivery medium, and a busy site can quickly rack up some nasty access costs if the files are being accessed frequently. The ideal setup is to STORE the images on S3 and SERVE images through CloudFront (or another CDN). The CDN can be set to cache the S3 origin for one or ten years, thus practically eliminating Amazon costs for GET requests to S3. Plus the CDN delivers the images from the closest node to the user, unlike S3 which is restricted to the bucket's region.

This would require the CDN URL setting in ES admin to also rewrite the paths to the images (or a new setting for S3 CDN URL yes/no and a field for the CDN URL), and I believe it is the best way to use remote storage. I helped Alejandro at jReviews code and debug this same feature in jReviews, and with 16,667 S3 images served through CloudFront on a site that gets 55,000 visitors per month, my combined storage/delivery costs are less than $10/month, and that includes all images, JS, and CSS on the entire site. The S3 chunk of that is usually a mere $0.50!!!

Thanks for sharing this Steven By the way, what is the cost prior to these changes?

I couldn't tell you since I never used S3 as a media delivery service without CloudFront, but a quick spin on the AWS calculator gives me approx $1.50 for US Virginia and $2.00 for South America -Sao Paulo (which is where my EC2 instance is hosted). Granted, $1.50 is nothing, but then again 200,000 GET requests per month is not that much. If I used CloudFlare I would be only paying for S3!

The other nice thing about rewriting the S3 images to a CDN URL is that you can deliver it with cdn.domain.com instead of that nasty AWS domain name!

Just some thoughts and thanks for listening.

Thanks for the heads up on this Steven, good share

So, any chance we might see new settings for image CDN delivery from S3 (one for http and one for https)? Otherwise point me to the file that generates the media URL and I will hack it for testing purposes if you want.

Really interesting. Subscribed.

Subscribed.

Hello Steven,

Hm, not really sure about the multiple http:// and https:// sources. What do you mean by this?

I mean that there are two cdn possibilites

1) The masked cdn like cdn.mysite.com using a CNAME to mask cloudfront.net over http
2) The raw cloudfront.net cdn for use over https (Amazon charges hundreds per month to have your own domain name served over https through cloudfront).

Wherever ES is checking local or remote storage, if remote storage is detected, there would be another check, to see if CDN is being used or not. If no, the regular S3 URL is used. If yes, the http cdn url is used (if http) or the https cdn url is used (if https). Check the screenshot to see how this is set this up in jReviews admin.

We have nice CDN URLs and practically zero S3 costs (my cloudfront costs are a bit high because 90% of my users are from Argentina which pulls the CloudFront files from an expensive region) on my site. Plus a CDN is MUCH faster than getting from S3. All-in-all, a much more professional presentation avoiding using the ugly S3 URLs.

Hello Steven,

You can edit the file /administrator/components/com_easysocial/includes/storage/adapters/amazon/amazon.php to replace the urls that is being served under the getPermalink method. This is assuming that you are storing your files on Amazon and serving it with a CDN.

Subscribed.

subscribe button please!

Noted, we'll try to add this to the forums

Funny you posted here today, I was JUST NOW messing around with this & CDN for Joomla. I haven't had time to "hack" the file yet, but I did manage to get it working with CDN for Joomla.

Site Root: https://s3-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/bucket-name
CDN Domain: blahblahblah1.cloudfront.net

The reason I couldn't get it working before is because apparently CloudFront does not like you adding S3 buckets as origins to an existing S3 distro. So I created a new one with my ES bucket as the origin and now it works.

Now, the problem with CDN for Joomla is it only has room for 5 CDNs, so anyone using https like me are restricted to two CDNs, because each one actually needs two slots: one slot for media.mydomain.com and one slot for the raw cloudfront.net domain over https (remember it costs hundreds of dollars to have a custom SSL cert on CloudFront).

So, non-urgent feature request: setting in admin to re-write s3 bucket URL replacing it with CDN url, one field for http and one field for https.

Well done Steve, great idea! Thanks!