By David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

As more people look for better hosting and better data services, Amazon’s S3 is the one that everyone continues to buzz about. They recently reported that during October, they were able to maintain more than 99.99 percent uptime, something that most hosting companies would not be able to match.

This exceeds the performance required by their recently introduced service level agreement. Starting in October, Amazon set up a SLA for their service so that users were guaranteed at least 99.9 percent of uptime. If Amazon’s S3 went below that mark, their customers could apply for a service credit of up to 25 percent of their total charges for the month, depending on how much Amazon fell below their 99.9 percent mark.

Amazon’s S3 storage service contains more than five billion objects from companies like 37Signals, webmail.us, YouOS, adaptiveblue, ElephantDrive and many more.

Details from Amazon.com:

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

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

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead.