November 12 2007

Amazon adds data storage for businesses

Amazon has launched its popular S3 (Simple Storage Service) product in Europe, hoping to attract European businesses to a service which won’t have the latency which affects European sites trying to use the US-based service.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a storage service that offers software developers and businesses access to the same storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

Since its launch in March 2006, the service has grown rapidly and is often used by UK and European Businesses because of its relative low cost and scalability.

Announced the at the  Web 2 Expo in Berlin last week (5-9th Nov), Adam Selipsky, vice president of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, said developers in Europe had asked them to add the ability to store data in Europe ever since its launch in the US. According to Selipsky Amazon is “working on” accepting payment in Euros and providing local language support.

Recent European users of S3 include the UK’s Comic Relief charity which typically has to deal with a lot of traffic.

The bad news is that the pricing will be higher than the US service. However the pricing policy is based on a storage-used basis and there’s no up-front or minimum fee.

The following are US$ prices for Amazon S3 in Europe:

Storage

$0.18 per GB - Month of storage used

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB/month data transfer out

$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB/month data transfer out

$0.13 per GB - data transfer out/month over 50 TB

Requests

$0.012 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests

$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

S3 is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides technology services that give businesses access to Amazon's own-back technology infrastructure that they can use to enable virtually any type of business

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)