Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)



What is S3stat?

S3STAT is a service that takes the detailed server access logs provided by Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Cloudfront offerings, and translates them into human readable statistics, reports and graphs. If you want, we can tell you what it does, how it works, what features it has, and even give you a step-by-step tutorial to build it yourself.

How do I read the reports? What's a "Hit"?

Our reports are generated by a 3rd party package called Webalizer, so fortunately for us there's plenty of existing documentation that we can point you to.

Here's a good guide to reading Webalizer reports that should get you pointed in the right direction.

In general, you can think of a "Hit" representing a request against one of the files in your bucket or distribution. "Files" don't really have any meaning in the context of cloud storage, so they can be safely ignored.

Is S3STAT associated with Amazon.com?

No, we're a 3rd party service that you can use to process the scary-looking logfiles that Amazon AWS provides for its S3 service. Amazon is aware of us, and we've had occasion to work with their developer team from time to time, but they don't own us or take any responsibility for anything we do.

Then why should I trust S3STAT with my AWS account information?

Good question. Your AWS credentials are similar to your credit card details in that you should be careful not to give them out to just anybody. We think we're pretty trustworthy, being a small public facing company with a history of good relationships with our customers and clients.

We've been running S3STAT for quite some time, and people seem to trust us. In the end, you'll have to decide for yourself whether to trust us too.

If, however, you don't mind exchanging a little effort for some extra peace of mind, we do offer the option to set your own buckets up by hand and run S3STAT in Self-Managed Mode.

Why are you charging money??? Isn't everything on the web supposed to be free???

I think it's safe to say that we're not going to be acquired by Google anytime soon, so we can't really use the standard Web2.0 business model for S3STAT. It costs money to keep the service running, so we charge money to use it. I know that seems strange, but it's a model that's worked well in other areas for quite some time, so we thought we'd give it a shot.

If, like us, you don't have any money of your own, you might want to check out the Cheap Bastard Plan and see if it's right for you.

We're a Fortune 500 company and we're using S3STAT reports to handle all the billing for our 10 million customers, and...

Wait, what? Let me stop you for a second and give you a quick piece of advice: Try not to base mission-critical portions of your business on a 3rd party service that's charging you $10/month!

We do our best to assure that your reports will arrive each night and that they'll be accurate, but if you need something heavy-duty that's guaranteed not to fail (to the point where you can feel comfortable building a business around it), please contact us and we'll talk about building you something custom that you can run and maintain on your own servers.


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