[SATLUG] Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3)...

[K. Spoon]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 05:09:18PM -0600, John Pappas wrote:
> Hey All,
> 
> I have been playing with AWS S3 lately.  Has anyone else?  What other
> online storage services are you all using, if any? 
> 
> For those of you who may not know of this service, it is a pay to use
> online storage service.  Current rates are $0.17/GB/Month and $0.20/GB
> transferred.
> 
> I love it.

Wow.  Awesome fscking find, John.

I've been exploring all of the stuff in labs.google.com for the past
couple of months... looks like it's time to check out what Amazon's got
hiding in plain sight.  :)  With any luck, there'll be a solution to my
e-commerce conundrum..

ObTopic: The method I've been using has been simply using cheap
dedicated servers that package decent sized disks and lots of bandwidth.
For about $95/month you can get a celeron server with a 120GB drive and
at least 1TB of transfer which works out to about $0.79/month with the 
option to move the data 10 times before you hit the limit.  If you're willing
to take the capex hit up front, I've found colo for a 1U server with a fixed
1Mb transfer rate is about $70-$90/month. 

Downsides:
* more root passwords to manage (ugh), more syslogs to watch, and more machines
  to update when a vuln is found  
* cost is all up-front instead of pay-as-you-go

Upsides:
* you can use whatever transfer method you want  :)
* you control who can see the data

Also, on the matter of dealing with DAV, I found cadaver to be useful in
dealing with WebDAV shares.  Gives you kind of an ftp-ish interface to
navigating the folders.  I haven't jacked around with the FUSE stuff,
but my impression is that it's the way to go (even if it feels hackish).

-- 
K. Spoon <kell at spoonix.com>