According to Amazon.com, its latest product, Amazon S3 (which stands for Simple Storage Service) is a “reliable, highly scalable, low-latency data storage service.”

Originally designed to support both Amazon’s own websites and users of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform, the service is targeted at developers of web applications and services.

Amazon say the idea is to pass on the benefits of scale Amazon has to independent developers, so that storing 1 GB of data only costs 15 cents a month, and transferring data in and out of the system costs 20 cents per GB.

  • Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
  • Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

If you’ve not fully grasped what this means, Amazon S3 enables you to set up web businesses that involve the storage and manipulation of large amounts of data without the usual cost and reliability concerns.

Cheap, secure storage on tap.

Compare Amazon S3′s 10 GB of storage for $1.50 per month to the rates at your favourite web host!

And of course, you could always use it to store a copy of your hard disk, accessible from anywhere in the world, although Google’s GDrive would be more suited to that….