I really didn’t pay it that much attention, or think about its full potential, at the time it was released. But Amazon’s Simple Storage Servic (hence the “S3”) is really pretty neat. In a nutshell, it’s file hosting on Amazon’s proven network infrastructure. (When have you ever seen Amazon offline?) They provide HTTP and BitTorrent access to files.

Their charges do add up — it might cost a few hundred dollars a month to move a terabyte of data and store 80GB of content. But then again, the reliability (and scalability!) is probably much greater than what I can handle, and it’s apparently much cheaper than it would be to host it with a ‘real’ CDN service.

Sadly, I can’t think of a good use for this service. I suppose the average person really doesn’t need to hire a company to provide mirrors of their files for download. (It would make an awesome mirror for Linux/BSD distributions, but I think the typical mirror is someone with a lot of spare bandwidth and an extra server, not someone paying hundreds a month to mirror files for other people… I wonder if there’s a market for a ‘premium’ mirror service? I doubt it, since the existing ones seem to work fine?)