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Amazon's New Storage Service
dlaur writes to tell us that today Amazon announced their Simple Storage Service (S3) allowing users to store unlimited amounts of data at $0.15 per GB paid monthly. From the article: "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."
I wonder how long it'll take to build a backup solution that encrypts your data locally with a private key before sending it off to amazon. That way they wouldn't be able to look through it, and at 15c/month/gig it'd be pretty affordable for home backups
It's good to see more sites adding APIs to their web services (Amazon already has other web services, as does Yahoo and Google of course). It's becoming even easier for "mere mortals" to link together new technologies to make innovative new systems, but I wonder if this reliance on third-party systems comes at a cost, perhaps to reliability or security?
With virtually no cost for this storage, they can make a killing charging $0.15/Gig/month.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The Department of Homeland Security announced it has started a data hosting service. They encourage backing up of family pictures, journals, and irc chats, among other things. There is no monthly cost, but encrypters need not apply. When questioned on how this is a good use of taxpayers money, they simply replied that they wanted material to test their new indexing algorithms on.
Apply now at database.dhs.gov/personal/suspects/index.php
DYWYPI?
This is an interesting case of diversification. Amazon, no longer content to be the middle man e-tailer, is shifting it's weight into Google's territory with a service-based profit model. If this trend continues at Amazon, I have to wonder if Google will make a hostile bid for its newfound competitor.
Here is a Link to EPIC, a speculative piece on the future of media, including the GoogleZon segment.
Google has NOT been ordered to "hand over all the search data". Google has not been ordered to do anything in fact. The judge has hinted that he intends to give the government a random sampling of the websites Google has indexed, but not individual search terms.
c le/2006/03/14/AR2006031401519.html
As far as the government wanting a pile of businesses data bases to search for porn or what not, that is simply illegal and would result in a prompt judicial smack down. If they want to know what is on someone's serve, they need to do it the old fashion way, with a search warrant... well, in theory at least. The executive branch these days seems to consider search warrants as being optional.
As tempting as it is to go off topic on the case of the executive branch ignoring warrant laws, I'll just drop a link and declare both parties worthless and pathetic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
lets see... for a year of 200gigs, that's $360 USD.
couldn't I jut buy a new hard drive every year or burn hundreds of DVDs for far far less? not to mention they'd be secure from whatever prying eyes or security holes an online backup provides.
Since this is nothing more than an API to access data, I wonder if this couldn't be used as the backend storage for existing file storage services, instead of paying for servers and bandwidth yourself...
This limits costs to storage actually used (at $0.15/GB which is a very fair rate), and bandwidth actually used. The cost that could add up is the bandwidth, where you'd obviously have to direct users to the amazon URL directly to avoid using bandwidth to get the file then to pass it on too.
Plus, at $0.20/GB of bandwidth, upload/download could get expensive still, with no cap on that cost. For example, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, which is bundled with most low-end dedicated servers nowadays (ie. even the sub-$99/mo. machines), this would cost you $400 from Amazon. That's pretty steep, and may be the limiting factor making it unfeasible for this idea. Interesting nonetheless.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Anyways, back on topic, at $0.15 a gig, it would take a long time before buying a hdd would be more affordable for me. (my hdd is 250g, I use about 100g, 100g = 15$, so after 10 months thats 150$... Still cheaper than this HDD that I didn't even get a year ago, on sale, for 200$)
Um, you should look at hard drive prices of today if you're going to be comparing server prices of today. Even retail prices put a 160 GB hard drive at $120. If you are willing to count the rebate price of that drive (it was at the top of the list; I didn't choose it because of the rebate explicitly), it's $50. That's 80 cents and 31 cents per gig respectively. Even if you count just the 100 GB, with rebate that's only 50 cents/gig. In under 4 months that way you'll break even.
Besides, whatcha gonna do? Run your programs remotely? Run your OS over the internet? I don't think so. You'd need a local mirror anyway, so you'd need that new hard drive.
This service has a lot of use, but from a backup standpoint I do NOT think it's at all a good option. Too expensive and too much hassle transferring that much data to make it worth it. (Are you really going to upload 100 gig? Even at a sustained rate of 150 KB/s upload (quite good from my experience over cable) that'd take over a week.)
While $0.15/Gb/month is reasonable, the poster fails to mention Amazon will also charge $0.20/Gb on transfer. So while you will pay $15/month for your 100 Gb pr0n collection, you will also pay $20 to upload it, and a further $20 to download the whole lot to your cube-buddy's computer.
From TFA: "Apart from the storage fee, you pay $0.20 per gigabyte transferred, but there are no minimum fees and no setup costs, so you pay as you go."
Still, not bad - but the economics for the home user are a little less ideal than first reported.
In general you might think that the cost per gig you pay and the cost per gig that Amazon pays is similar. And you would be right. But to obtain high reliability you will pay more.
Amazon, or anybody who tries to build a large distributed storage service, can spread out the probability of disk errors over a larger set of users than you are able to do. The marginal cost to replace a disk that has failed, on a per user basis, is therefore lower for Amazon.
Moreover, the overhead to manage many disks does not increase linearly to the number of disks. Put another way, their per user cost to manage the disks is lower than you.
The cost equation is less about purchasing the storage than maintaining it through the inevitable failures over time. This makes the gigabyte-based usage cost very fair, since it is proportional to the rate of error. The access cost manages their bandwidth expense.
What I would like from a service like this is a pricing guarantee -- if they maintain the same pricing two years from now, it will be a ripoff given the diminishing cost of storage and bandwidth. It would be nice to have it pegged to some kind of disk/bandwidth industry index.
8) If your Application is determined (for any reason or no reason at all, in our sole discretion) to be unsuitable for Amazon Web Services, we may suspend your access to Amazon Web Services or terminate this Agreement at any time, without notice.
I am not sure I see the point of using a storage service that has the right to unilaterally terminate my agreement and thus, presumably, destroy anything I have stored.
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This isn't flaimbait. It's true. What happened yesterday on the floor of the senate is a good reason to be afraid of warrantless search. Right now the only people standing between your private data and the executive branch are Google and Feingold.
Users with data like yours also had the following data...
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
I find it disturbing that I do not trust the State enough to place my data with a third party provider for fear of my privacy potentially being violated.
Of course, my data is unimportant and the State has no interest in me; but *as such* it should be the case that my data isn't even *potentially* accessable to the State - and yet I rather suspect that it is.
As such, I am actually now being suppressed by the State; the State behaves in such a way that I, to preserve my privacy, have to protect myself.
The State is way, way too big for its own good; it's destroying now the freedoms it was created to protect.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
My minimal requirements would be Webdav, sftp, and rsync-ssh; SOAP and REST I don't care about.
Oh, and also it should come from a company that isn't running a vast data mining operation.
So what?
I don't understand why people don't automatically distrust the security of any data not under their direct control. Data held by anyone else could be (mis)used by someone you don't want using it - be it a government agency, an employee causing trouble, a naughty contractor, a script kiddie who got access to something he shouldn't have access to, or any one of a million other people or groups.
If you have sensitive data, you should be taking steps to ensure the protection and integrity of that data, no matter what you're doing with it. Encryption is the most obvious solution, although it's not the answer for every situation.
It seems like this new service would be best for offsite backup of prescious data.
However, it isn't all that cost-effective. A local disk is very cheap comparatively, but (as a friend of mine found out) if someone steals your computer, they steal your backup too.
Are there any services out there which connects people with reasonable connections over long distances to back-up eachothers data? I'd be willing to get a new 80GB drive and make it available via a private FTP server if someone else would do the same for me.
Or are there cheaper offsite solutions than Amazon's?
The ______ Agenda
Quickplacer, the fastest robot in the world
Amazon supports BitTorrent for the storage. Does that mean they run the tracker? Interesting way to save on transfer fees that
I read the documentation this afternoon. Very clever use of REST, SOAP and BitTorrent. They provide client libraries for many languages.
I can see why Amazon is providing this; to make money off their excess bandwidth and storage space.
I can't really see why a customer would want to use it though. Why not just use a real web host? Amazon S3 has is no minimum monthly fee, has redundancy built into it, guaranteed availability.
Compared with Dreamhost (say) which has a bundle for almost 10 USD/mo. That deal has 20GB + 1TB transfers. For the same amout on Amazon S3 you only 5 GB + 64GB transfers, and doesn't have FTP nor SSH access, nor your own domain, etc etc.
Maybe we should think of it as an inexpensive web cache, like akamai.
I suspect that even Amazon doesn't know what this will be useful for. The developed it for their own use, then polished up for resell. Now they wait for the applications to appear.
It looks like Amazon managed to get their storage product out before the rumored Google Drive (TechCrunch article, Slashdot article). I wonder how Amazon's product will compare to Google's, whenever Google's is released. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Amazon and Google will end up competing with each other in terms of price and transfer speeds.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not with any of the recent tape formats. They're all "serpentine" - That is, a very narrow track (up to 1/512 of the width of the tape) goes from the start to the end of the tape. The head then moves down a fraction, and writes the next track "backwards".
This means that the seek time is reduced by up to 512x. Of course, this isn't free - Tape wear is increased since there are many, many more passes over the tape.
Let's take a 300GB System that needs to be backed up:
900GB at $0.20/gb = $180.00 transfer fee
Monthly at $0.15/gb = $135.00/month recurring charge
Weekly incremental of 30GB = $6.00/wk = $24/mo recurring charge
So $180.00 + $159/month = $2088 just for the first year, plus whatever you have to pay your ISP for abusive bandwidth charges.
Let's look at it from another perspective:
4 WD3200SD 320GB Raid-Edition SATA Drives: About $600
1 4-Port SATA Raid Card: About $250
Expected Lifetime: 5 years
So, buying a whole other raid-5 array to mirror your 900GB of stuff costs nearly $10K to store for 5 years on Amazon versus $850 to store locally. Hell, even if you were paranoid and replaced one of the hard disks every 3 months, you'd still be at less than half the cost.
I won't even get into which is more secure. If it's not on your site or some place you have physical control over, it is not secure.
I don't need an envelope to send a DVD-R upstairs...
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Oops. Left out the important part of the quote. It should have said:
2) The limitation of 1 call/per second/per IP address set forth in Section 1.A.2 above is not applicable to your use of Amazon S3. You may not, however, store "objects" (as described in the user documentation) that contain more than 5 Gigabytes of data, or own more than 100 "buckets" (as described in the user documentation) at any one time.