Amazon AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage service. There is no minimum payment for using S3. You pay for the amount of data stored in S3, number of requests, cross-region replication etc. S3 storage pricing might not be the same in all regions.

The data you upload to S3 is stored in buckets. Consider bucket as a container for storing all your files/objects.

You can create multiple buckets in a region or in different region. There is no charge for creating an empty bucket. For creating an amazon S3 bucket, you must first create an amazon aws account. Follow the below steps to create an AWS account if you don’t have one.

1. Open the link https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ in your web browser
2. Click on ‘Get Started with Amazon S3’
3. Select ‘Create a new AWS account’ to create a new AWS account

Follow the instruction to create an account. Do the below steps to create an S3 bucket.

1. Log in to Amazon AWS console

2. In the ‘AWS Management Console’ search for ‘S3’ in ‘Find services’

OR

Scroll down and click on ‘S3’ under ‘Storage’

OR

Just open the link https://s3.console.aws.amazon.com/s3/ in your browser to access S3.

3. Choose ‘Create bucket’

4. Enter a unique DNS-compliant name for your s3 bucket.

S3 bucket names should be unique. You cannot use a S3 bucket name if it is already taken by another AWS user.

The name you choose should be unique across all S3 buckets. The name you set for the S3 bucket cannot be changed later. Bucket name should be atleast 3 characters long and should not be more than 63 characters.

Bucket name should not contain uppercase letter. Bucket name should begin with a lowercase letter or a number.

5. Choose the ‘Region’ where you wish to create the bucket.

Region is a separate geographic area and it consists of multiple isolated availability zones. It is better to create the S3 bucket in a region that is closest to your location. Choosing a region close to you will reduce latency.

In the above image you can see that my bucket name is ‘test-bucket’ and the region is US East (North Virginia).

6. You can enter bucket name under ‘Copy setting from an existing bucket’ if you want to copy the settings from an existing bucket in your account.

7. Click on ‘Create’. You can configure all the bucket settings later, after you create the bucket.

Click on ‘Next’ instead of ‘Create’, if you want to configure object versioning, cloudwatch request metrics, server access logging, object-level logging etc. In the next page you can configure ACL for the bucket.

Enter a different bucket name if you see the error ‘Bucket name already exist’.