Hey, this is an interesting idea. Amazon has started a service called S3 that can be used for web storage. In case the idea of web storage is perplexing to you, it’s actually pretty simple. Your personal computer stores files on its hard drive. Web services like Gmail or Flickr store your mail or photos, respectively, on their hard drive. Web storage is a way of saving your files not on your own computer, but on someone else’s. Then you can access your data from anywhere that you can get an internet connection, rather than just on your computer.
The interesting thing about S3, though, is that they have not designed an interface for the service. Instead, they’ve released their API so that other people can build their own interfaces for the system. The storage space is pretty cheap (15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 20 cents per gigabyte of transfer), and Amazon is a pretty trustworthy company. I’m excited to see if this approach will work, and wonder what creative implementation ideas people have for this. I guess I’ll have to wait and see, but it seems pretty exciting at this point.
One response to “Amazon S3”
What happens to the data if Amazon gets bought? Is there fine print to worry about that might muck up access or ownership down the road?