anybody using Amazons S3 web services?

[completerookie]

a collegue allerted me to Amazons S3 services yesterday.
He's been using it quite a lot recently and swears by it,
I haven't YET started using it, but I shall be taking a serious look.

in a nutshell, it provides for an online pay-as-you-go storage facility at very very cost effective rates - the rates are much better explained by looking at the FAQ link half way down the page.

Its ideal for the sort of "off-line" storage facility that you use to store those important bits of data - this is NOT a substitute for backups, more belt and braces aproach

There is also the availablitity to use it for storing those "publicly available documents" that you have on your web site, you are able to open up parts of your storage to the public and then simply use a link on your web site.

I understand Flikr and the likes use the services.

If you use a zip file to crunch the data BEFORE sending it to S3, then your costs go down even further. - don't forget to password protect your zip file as well.

so the question is, has anyone got any experience of using the Amazon S3 service, whats it like, how do your costs "mount up" etc etc.

[Mike Hughes]

It does look very cheap doesn't it. Their calculator suggests that storing 2GB of data and updating once a week will only cost something like $1.11 per month.

As you say, not a backup service but probably a useful place to store copies of important files.

Mike

[dscontroller]

Amazingly 'cheap as chips', but didn't read the Conditions, which seem a mite long!!

I'm sure it will attract a lot of use as we all have some data we could do with backing up.