It is no secret that Amazon AWS log files aren’t the easiest to work with.  Who wants to spend the time making special scripts or formatting logs into spreadsheet tables for hours on end every day when you could leave that work to professionals?  For this reason, multi•new•media has been on the search for a log processor for our AWS operations: S3Stat.com

S3Stat, named loosely after Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) offering, is one of the most simple, clean, and easy-to-use AWS log reporting tools that we’ve encountered so far in our exploration of cloud based tools for the media sector.  In fact, to jump to what otherwise might be a conclusion, S3Stat provides the interface what we at multi•new•media feel should have come standard from Amazon as a part of using the S3 or Cloudfront (Content Delivery Network) services.  Needless to say, Amazon doesn’t provide any simple reporting tools for descriptive analytics, so it’s a great thing that tools like S3Stat.com exist.

Pricing for S3Stat.com starts at just $10/mo. for sites with under 200,000 hits per day as registered by their Amazon S3 and Cloudfront assets.  For larger operations, a Professional tier and Enterprise tier (5 million hits per day or more) exist for the prices of $50/mo and $300/mo, respectively.  The folks at S3Stat.com also have an amazing sense of humor and offer what they call a “Cheap Bastard” plan that can result in a no-cost unlimited license of the S3Stat service, but more on that later.

No matter which pricing level you select, a first month of standard service is free at S3Stat, and best of all, no credit card is required for the trial.  To be perfectly blunt, this was what initially appealed to us at multi•new•media about S3Stat first.  Before we even had the opportunity to look at and compare services, most stat reporting tools wanted credit card numbers on file… but we here at multi•new•media are much more inclined to fall into the previously mentioned “Cheap Bastard” category than the “credit-card-on-file” type.

Being fully transparent, S3Stat indicates that their initial desire was to create the service under the freemium model, but their costs made it apparent that it wouldn’t be possible for them to support the average casual user through large enterprise accounts alone.  Despite the $10/mo subscription that resulted from these findings, S3Stat can also be had for free by those willing to promote, review, or advertise the service during or after their free month long trial.

As we stated before, we at multi•new•media have absolutely no issue with being called “cheap.”  Also, S3Stat.com is a service that we will likely will suggest to others anyway, so let us conclude by thanking you for reading our unpaid and unendorsed review of S3Stat.com that we not only stand by, but also hope will save us a few bucks!

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