Amazon S3 was just released today, giving developers/companies the ability to instantly store files/data up to 5GB in size - and as many as you want. They just charge pennies for bandwidth and storage costs.
Are you looking for a new way to make money?
- Amazon S3 Perl Library + IO::All::LWP + MogileFS Perl Module = Always-on File Hosting
- Amazon S3 Perl Library + Filesys::Virtual + Net::DAV::Server + Do it yourself .MAC = Permanent, Cheap, .Mac
- Amazon S3 Java Library + Cross Platform Drag and Drop = Reliable, cross-platform, backups with instant retreival.
Wrap a quick reverse proxy on top of the public S3 URLs, require any of the above to use a secure password, charge $X dollars/month. Presto, instant data storage company.
Bradley (March 15, 2006 at 8:44 pm)
Right. A lot of people are starting to pick this up. It will certainly "change the game" in some ways.
One of the small details that people are neglecting to notice is that the bandwidth charges are bidirectional. Nevertheless, it's a sweet price point.
I guess the overall point is that it's for developers, not end users. But for a small company just getting started, it might be the most affordable entry to market. That is, if you feel comfortable outsourcing file storage. Very sensitive data is likely best kept on your own machines.
John Resig (March 15, 2006 at 10:42 pm)
Yeah, I definitely caught that bi-drectional part, it's tricky. Amazon's tactic for building these non-user-centric applications (S3, Mechanical Turk) is very interesting. They don't have to deal with customer support, only developer support - forcing that responsibility onto the application developers. It'll be interesting to see which applications come out as a result of this.
Raymond Brigleb (March 19, 2006 at 12:22 pm)
Right now my business pays for .Mac for every member of the team, and we also use StrongSpace for backups from multiple locations. I expect that before the next billing cycle from each of those services, we should be able to replace both with a little Ruby/Rails work and some love. Very excited about that!