S3Browse Background

About Amazon S3

The Simple Storage Servive gives you access to a cheap, reliable storage solution with an nearly unlimited capacity. There are no upfront costs or subscription fees. You only pay a fee for the amount of information you store and for the bandwidth you use. The fees are very low, currently (2007-02-01):

• $0.15 per GB per month for storage
• $0.20 per GB of data transfered

For example, you can backup your 12 GB music collection for $2.40 plus $1.80 per month. There is no minimum fee and no start-up cost.

Besides storage, Amazon S3 is also very well suited for distributing large files to a group of people or to the general public. It is even possible to distribute the files using the bittorrent peer-to-peer protocol. This will save bandwidth costs and can speed up the downloads.

Why use S3Browse?

Amazon offers only a low level http based interface to access the storage service. This interface is meant for web programmers and not for end-users. For end-users there are a number of specialised applications that use S3 as the underlying storage service. S3Browse wants to offer a general purpose, easy to use web interface to Amazon S3.

The current beta version of S3Browse offers most of the functionality that is available through the Amazon S3 API. New versions of S3Browse will offer more functionality that is not directly available through the API. This new functionality will make it easier and more efficient to use the service.

There are also special versions of S3Browse planned that target a specific usage scenario. For example an interface that makes it easy to store your entire photo or music collection on Amazon S3. Or an interface that let's you use Amazon S3 to send very large files as virtual email attachments.

What does S3Browse cost?

Using S3Browse is free. But ofcourse, when you upload and download files through S3Browse to the Amazon S3, Amazon will charge you for that.