Amazon Lowers Outgoing Bandwidth Pricing
Amazon has reduced the cost of bandwidth served out by its various web services, including S3, EC2 and their CloudFront content delivery network. Prices now start at $0.15 USD per GB for the first 10TB. This is down from $0.17USD per GB before.
New prices for everything but CloudFront look like this now:
| Level | Old Price | New Price |
| First 10 TB per month | $0.17/GB | $0.15/GB |
| Next 40 TB per month | $0.13 | $0.11 |
| Next 100 TB per month | $0.11 | $0.09 |
| Over 150 TB per month | $0.10 | $0.08 |
While it doesn’t sound like a lot, if you are serving out a ton of files from S3, you should see some pretty decent savings. Let’s say you serve out 250GB in a month. Your bill just for outgoing bandwidth would drop from $42.50 to $37.50. Not bad, and the more you serve the more you would save.
You can learn more about the new pricing and more specific CloudFront details over the Amazon Web Services blog.
7 Reasons Higher Ed is the Best Gig in all the Web
I’ve been following via Twitter and blogs this week talk about the challenges and obstacles we face in the web world of higher education. Mark Greenfield started the conversation here, and Nikki Kauffman continued things here. Michael Fienen has a similar post about why higher ed is great here. Good to see we have some different reasons.
I agree with a large number of the points people have made about our struggles as web folks, but I wanted to also take a few moments to talk about why higher education is an awesome place to work. Seriously. It’s awesome.
1. Billable Hours
Well, lack thereof.
I worked at an advertising agency for nearly two years and a web development shop for a spell before that, and believe me when I say I don’t miss tracking every single quarter hour and what time was spent on what job for what client. We often gave the client a quote based on a number of hours, and that means we had to the work quickly and often didn’t have the opportunity to research a new framework, jQuery neatness or tool that could solve a problem because the client wasn’t going to pay for that learning. Want to make a change or need more time? Well, that’s a change in scope that required a “Scope Change” document that the client had to sign off on.
In higher ed, I think we have more opportunities to take a moment to think about a project and find what the best tool for the job is.
2. Collaboration
One of things I love about working in higher education is that I get to work with all sorts of different offices around campus, all who work with different audiences. Same goes for faculty. I’ve had the chance to learn about so many things that normally I wouldn’t even be exposed to.
I came into higher ed knowing nothing about the behind-the-scenes process in admissions, alumni and donor relations, athletics, student involvement and much more. I’ve tried to be a sponge and soak it all in, and then applying that knowledge where needed. All those nuggets and acronyms and tricks of the trade will very much help me in the future.
3. Vision Street Wear
Unlike web development in the private sector, I get to be involved in the creative process more, whether its how code is developed, a way to manage data, the colors on our new WordPress theme or the overall branding package of my college on the web.
Often, in client development, you must work within a pre-determined set of standards. That’s okay, but having the chance to be creative is refreshing and keeps me sharp. Seeing your work be featured front and center is nice for the ol’ ego.
4. C.R.E.A.M.
Ok, it’s a fact we aren’t paid what we’d be paid if we worked in the private sector, but look beyond just the number that is your salary.
We often are able to take undergraduate and graduate classes, often for free. That same perk often applies to our partners and children as well. That’s huge – how many of you have a Master’s or MBA that you got for free? That’s worth tens of thousands of dollars right there.
There are also other very nice perks – generous vacations, decently priced benefits (this one is a bit tricky depending on institution), often a very nice 401k match, use of campus facilities like the gym, bookstore discounts, the opportunity to see speakers on a variety of topics and more. I’ve seen a US Senator, a sitting Vice President, famous authors, Ben Folds, Bill Clinton, The Roots and oh yeah, Wayne Brady. For free, in my small rural town.
5. Lots of different types of projects
I love higher ed because I get to do a whole lot of everything. Need that web app written? That’s me. Need a graphic designed? Me. Email marketing? Me. Video shot, edited and posted to YouTube? Me. Need an update posted to Facebook? I’m your guy. Getting to wear many hats keeps me sharp and keeps me continually learning new things.
In the private sector, you’re often the designer or the developer or the client account manager and ne’er the three (or so) shall meet, except maybe in scope change meetings (see above.) I can’t think of too many other jobs where I’d get to wear so many fine chapeaux.
6. Students
Working with students is great. Yes, sometimes they are flaky and unreliable, especially around finals time, but overall, they are more than cheap labor. They can keep you in touch with what’s going on “on the ground” when it comes to the services your college offers, especially in the social media realm.
Do students do some grunt work? Sure. That stuff is just as important as a redesign or CMS – updating web pages and adding new information is maybe the most important task we do. By having students do the easy, yet sometimes annoying stuff, it frees us up to think about the big picture or go shoot that video (see above.)
Here’s the other thing. I have several students who have worked for me over the last seven and a half years here go on to work in the web development field or attend graduate programs in computer science. Especially for those who went into the workforce, their time with me looks very good on a resumé. They spend 3 or 4 years doing real-world, production work on a site that gets 2+ million visits a year. Not many students coming out of college who only did course work can say that. My students have shot video, built web applications, done HTML updates, designed things in Flash and so, so much more. We are preparing these kids for the workforce.
One more thing about students. Working with students keeps me feeling young. Okay, I’m 33, I’m not that old, but whether its my work study students or the kids I work with as advisor to the radio station here on campus, you can’t help but get caught up in their exuberance and energy. Often, the most fun we have is just sitting around talking. We talk about sports and movies and Modern Warfare 2 and the web and music. We have fun. Fun = key.
7. There are no small parts, only small actors
I like to think that by working in higher education, we’re making the world a slightly better place. Whether we’re working with admissions or advising or student life or athletics or alumni, we’re having a direct impact on the lives of thousands of young people every day.
We’re helping to hopefully point them in the right direction when it comes to their careers and being good citizens. Am I alone responsible for all that? Goodness no. I am but one small instrument. Put it all together, and I think I can safely say we’re making a positive change in the world.
Your incoming class this fall could have the next Steve Jobs. Or the next Mark Zuckerman. Or the next Steven Hawking. Who knows. That’s part of the fun.
So that’s it. What am I missing? I’m sure there are many more pluses when it comes to working in higher education.
Holiday Card Post-Mortem
Ah, the college and university holiday card. Come November, does any other type of project that web developers face bring as strong a sense of dread? If you’re like me, you end up putting it off longer and longer each year.
I think enough time has passed since the end of last year that we can now take an objective look at the holiday card we produced this year and as I watch ours, I’m really, really happy with how it came out. If you would have asked me mid-December, you would have gotten a different answer.
Here’s a breakdown on our card, the process and some tech specs and costs.
After several years of variations on the moving campus images card, we decided to go full video this year. We worked with our friends at Route1a, a full-service agency in Erie, PA. I worked with several of the people there years ago at an advertising agency, and they produced our matriculation video this past fall. They’re great guys who have produced awesome pieces for us in the last year.
First, here’s the alumni holiday video we produced:
After some brainstorming work by our communications and development teams, we spent a day and a half filming students and our college’s President. All the production was done in our alumni house. It has many different styles and looks and I think you’d be hard pressed to say it all was in one building.
The students were great – we filmed each of them saying multiple lines to give us options when it came time to edit. It was getting close to finals time, so we wanted to get them in and out as quickly as possible, and in most cases the students were done in a matter of minutes.
Route1a spent a day or so editing and we spent an afternoon with them making some final tweaks. We ended up making two videos, one with an alumni related message and one for prospective students. At the end of the day, we left with two very large HD files.
Since we shot the video in 24fps 1080p high def video, I wanted the video that people watched to be as amazing looking as the video I was seeing at Route1a and from the super hi-res we were watching on a big monitor in the office.
I ended up sizing the video down to 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels wide and I crunched down the file using VisualHub (RIP) and used the H.264 codec to produce a high quality MP4. In the past, we’ve taken that file and saved out an FLV file, but I didn’t want to do one more compression step, further reducing the quality of the video. The clips ended up being 17 MB and 21 MB, which is large but worth it for the quality I wanted.
I initially was going to use Amazon’s new CloudFront Flash streaming to stream out content, but in my tests I couldn’t get it to start quickly. It would often sit for 10 to 15 seconds before it started playing. If that was the wait time, just about everyone would have given up. I ended up going with regular CloudFront to serve the video files and just vanilla CloudFront was super fast and started serving content quickly and playback started after just a few seconds of buffering.
That month, we served 86 GB of holiday card video and other holiday card assets like CSS, images and our video player code to users worldwide. Our bandwidth bill for December: $14.76 USD. Not bad at all for the peace of mind that this video was going to be served super fast to people no matter where in the world they were.
In the end, I’m really proud of this project. Not only does it look great, the students were great and the message of the videos was different than what we’ve done in the past. A win all around.
