Marshall Brain's Blog

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Amazon.com S3 storage service available today

From the article:

This morning Amazon opened up S3, its new online storage solution for web applications, and now you can store unlimited amounts of data on Amazon servers for US$.15 per gigabyte, paid monthly. S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it. Check out the stated design philosophy...

I am sure that other smaller companies are offering services like this, but Amazon is a big player and makes it legitimate.

What I will be interested to see is whether or not other companies now start offering the same thing at a lower price. Hard disk space is cheap these days. Here is a 250GB drive for $89. That's only 36 cents per gig. In other words, it takes only two months for Amazon to recover the cost of the hard disk space you use. Yes, Amazon has bandwidth and backup costs, but there is likely still a large markup in there, meaning plenty of room for competition.

A couple weeks ago I discussed the idea of doing this sort of thing using peer-to-peer networks. See this post for details. In that case, storage space on the network would be free.