Amazon S3 Adds Option To Make Data Accessors Pay 80
CWmike writes "Amazon.com has rolled out a new option for its Simple Storage Service (S3) that lets data owners shift the cost of accessing their information to users. Until now, individuals or businesses with information stored on S3 had to pay data-transfer costs to Amazon when others made use of the information. Amazon said the new Requester Pays option relieves data providers of that burden, leaving them to pay only the basic storage fees for the cloud computing service. The bigger question with the cloud is, who really pays? Mark Everett Hall argues that IT workers do."
Re:Whew (Score:3, Informative)
S3 (a developer platform) coupled with a consumer front end (such as JungleDisk which works on Win/OS X/Lin) makes a great storage/backup solution. With JungleDisk's ability to keep old versions and deleted versions for a specified interval, you don't even have to worry so much that your only backup solution is mirroring (as you'll be able to recover point in time with a little effort). It's great for personal use in this sense.
JungleDisk can even encrypt your files before uploading them, and transparently decrypt them when you retrieve them (3des I believe, with a user-provided private key), so there's no worry about their contents being snooped on by Amazon or overzealous LEO's.
I use this as one of my tiers for backing up my photography and music library (about 43 gig of photography and 30 gig of music). Monthly billing from Amazon is per gb, and it's something really reasonable like $0.16/gb/mo. My billing comes out to under $17 (I've got some other stuff in there too, but the photos and the music would be the hardest to replace).