Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service
With all the hype surrounding online storage services such as Box.net, Amazon has decided to get in the game with their new service S3, Simple Storage Service. Before I go any further, I must say that S3 isn’t aimed at the same market as Box.net. S3 integrates well with REST and SOAP interfaces which are things that only developers are familiar with anyways. Amazon has fully grokked what developers want and S3 will be offered with just about any amount of storage as developers require. A possible use would be making a script linked to a cron job to dynamically backup your blog database every so often and save it to S3. Right now I have my database backed up nightly and sent to my gmail account, but S3 seems like a more worthy solution, especially as my database gets larger and will eventually hit the 10MB attachment size limit.
S3 can only be accessed through their API or the mentioned interfaces, making it pretty much in a different league than Box.net. A very nice touch is Amazon’s inclusion of the BitTorrent protocol as an alternate method for downloading stored files. This is great if a company has an S3 account and a team of developers needs to access the same file(s), they can speed up the process with a torrent.
Very interesting idea indeed. Although, Amazon being in the web storage business kind of seems weird to me. Especially since the product is being geared more toward developers instead of consumers. It kind of seems like this is something they’ve been using on their backend and some developer had the idea to sell the technology and make money off of it.
Now regarding Bittorrent, I wish more main stream companies would start seeing Bittorrent as a viable solution. It really does help cut down on bandwidth costs, and there are just as many legitimate uses for the protocol as there are illegal ones.
Considering what a stingy person I am, and how much free storage there is, I don’t see myself using this soon, though it does seem like a fairly nice service
Why not mozy.com which I use for all files except iWork and iLife files, which I store on .Mac?
Would be nice to know why you don’t fancy those solutions.
@geirsan - S3 is developer-oriented so I can code up something to automatically backup my server. It’s definitely not for the average user as Mozy is. As such you can’t really compare the two. For me, S3 is many times more useful for the number of ways I can interact with its API.