After re­cently start­ing our pod­cast (Ten to One, where we make top ten lists about every­thing), one of our first ques­tions was: is any­one lis­ten­ing? Now, we’re just pod­cast­ing for fun, so we’re not con­cerned with get­ting a bunch of peo­ple to lis­ten. But we’re still cu­ri­ous. Since the pod­cast files are hosted on Amazon’s S3, I started look­ing into ways of track­ing down­loads.

Let me save you some time: there’s no easy, ac­cu­rate way to do it your­self.

Tracking Amazon S3 downloads
Me, cal­cu­lat­ing Amazon S3 down­loads

Thankfully, you don’t have to do it your­self: S3Stat will do it for you! After a fif­teen-minute setup, all I had to do was wait for the data to come in.

S3Stat col­lects the data and gives you some won­der­ful ta­bles and graphs. You know I love graphs.

Graph of Amazon S3 downloads

For a hobby pod­cast like ours, I can’t jus­tify pay­ing $10/month for track­ing down­load stats when we pay only pen­nies a month for web­site host­ing and file stor­age. However, S3Stat has of­fered to give a free li­cense to any­one who blogs about their prod­uct. Very gen­er­ous!

To con­clude: track­ing S3 down­loads your­self is ridicu­lously hard; S3Stat makes it ridicu­lously easy. For both busi­nesses and hobby users us­ing S3, their ser­vice is a no-brainer.