smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’ve been mucking around with Amazon’s S3 Web Service, which is best described as an increasingly versatile hosted, mass storage and inexpensive bit-bucket that can hold images, data, audio, and, well, anything — with some gloriously low costs combined with a reasonably punchy service:

Storage
 $0.15 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

 Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
 Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
 $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
 $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

As we can see, the actual running costs are pretty trivial — and you can work out how much of an impact the service might have on your website revenue, or the hip-pocket by using using the trusty AWS calculator.

Oh, and the logo up top? Served by the very S3 storage mentioned, seamlessly. This may open up options for a return to podcasting, as the costs scale very well and won’t impact my (mt) based storage — indeed I’m looking at moving plugin and theme downloads to s3 as it has some pretty useful advantages.

If you’re looking for inexpensive storage options, check it out.