I have often written about how innovative Amazon is as a company. It’s probably the online company I respect the most, from its amazingly valuable (to my family, anyway) Prime service to its works-on-all-devices Kindle format.
I haven’t really talked much about one area where Amazon innovates, its S3 online storage service. S3 is a service that essentially virtualizes storage and then makes it accessible through an API. As a result, S3 is a cloud storage “device” that can (and has been) baked into many applications as an alternative to storing things locally.
The thing is, S3 is also quite inexpensive. Certainly, as you scale up into the holy-cowabyte level, it gets costly, but for many of us, the amount Amazon charges us for this service is astonishingly low.
For example, one of the servers I back up (it’s got a couple of gigabytes or so) cost me all of $0.11 last month. Seriously. Here’s the payment notice.
It’s astonishing. Now, I’m always a little concerned that I’ll configure something incorrectly, or read something and not quite interpret it right, and one day I’ll get a monster bill, but that hasn’t happened yet — and I actually pretty much doubt it will.
Note to literalists (you know who you are!): The title of this post is meant to be sarcastic. I don’t believe $0.11 is too much to charge. I think it’s an amazingly good deal for what I get.
One reason I feel pretty secure that I’m safe with my 11-cent bill from Amazon is that the company today announced a 12% to 13.5% reduction in prices, depending on your usage pattern.
Seriously. Reduction. Here’s the chart.
Now, ask yourself this: when was the last time your power company or your cable company wrote you a note and let you know they were reducing prices because they were innovating and driving down prices? Yeah, I know. Crazy, eh?
So there you go. If you’re using a ton of S3 space, your bill’s going down next month. Even if you’re not using a ton of space, your bill is probably going down. Can’t beat that with a stick.
See also:
- Challenge to Amazon: show the world America values workers
- Why Amazon is winning online retail and should fold on this silly sales tax fight
- Amazon: apparently close enough for government work
- How Amazon has proven that iTunes is totally obsolete
So, are you using S3? What are you using it for and how much are you paying? TalkBack below.
cpt|ua|new orleans|seven eleven|nnamdi asomugha
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