Amazon rents out storage by the gigabyte
Amazon S3 turns internet-accessible storage into a metered utility, giving small software teams infrastructure once reserved for companies with server rooms.
Amazon today opened its Simple Storage Service, or S3, to developers in the United States. The web service stores and retrieves any amount of data through a programming interface, with no up-front fee or long contract.
The price is 15 cents per gigabyte of storage each month and 20 cents per gigabyte transferred. Developers choose their own keys for stored objects and can decide whether each item stays private or becomes publicly readable.
S3 is less visible than a new computer, but its premise is unusually ambitious: computing infrastructure can be bought as needed, like a utility. A student project can now begin without purchasing a storage server, while a growing service can add capacity without guessing its eventual size. Reliability, bandwidth charges and dependence on Amazon will matter, but the economics of starting an internet company have plainly shifted.
Source: Amazon press release ↗