Amazon Storage Cloud (S3)
13 Mar
Amazon Storage Cloud (Amazon S3) Review
General Information
“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”
Prices
Our Usage
We tested Amazon S3 Storage Cloud with similar stats as we tested Rackspace Cloud Files.
Our Review
We found that Amazon S3 has a tendancy to leave you in the dark when you originally sign up. A sign up is needed first for an Amazon Web Services account, to then be followed by another account needing opened for the Amazon S3 account. Once the sign up is confirmed, you will not be told anything else, you just confirm your details leave it at that. There is also no control panel, however, they do provide you with documentation.
We chose the S3Fox Organizer FireFox add-on to manage our Amazon S3 account, which is very similar to the tools used with other Cloud Storage providers, but first, to enable the FireFox Plugin to talk to Amazon S3, you will need to get hold of your API key and secret key. This proved to be a large task as we spent at least 5 minutes trying to locate it. Eventually we found it in Account -> Security Credentials -> Access Keys. Once we connected the account up everything seemed okay and very similar to using similar tools with other providers.
Prices vary depending on how much you are storing, but for the majority of people, and us, we will be using less than 50TB of data, therefore comes in at the same price as Rackspace’s Cloud Files $0.15/GB, but it does have one of the lower data transfer rates also at $0.15/GB.
Although we haven’t used Amazon Technical Support due to a lack of problems, we can see that they do not offer free direct technical support. They have a service called AWS Premium Support which would leave you at least $100 out of pocket and unless you are on the $400+ plan (Gold Plan) you do not even get 24 x 7 x 365 support which would be free from other Cloud service providers. Free support only includes a Resource Center, Service Health Dashboard, Technical FAQs, and Developer Forums. This is certainly where other Cloud Storage providers have the upper hand on Amazon S3.
The speed seems parrallel to other storage clouds and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them on a normal internet connection.
More Information
Click here to go to Amazon S3
Screenshots
Amazon S3 Screenshot 1