Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Micropayment for storage service


I just received a bill for the very small amount of storage I had used on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) during the month of July. The charge for my storage and data transfer was 4 cents!

We have talked about micropayments for years, but, until now, I had never made one.

This is a terrific example of Web services. S3 is the base service -- offering reliable, infinitely scalable storage in Amazon's data centers. But, I do not deal directly with Amazon. Jungledisk has virtual disk software that makes my S3 store look like a standard disk drive on my computer. They insulate me from S3, pay Amazon, and bill me. My payment is automatic through another service, Paypal.

5 comments:

  1. $0.04 for a maintained server and unlimited storage. This sounds like a great deal to me !!

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  3. Omar -- the charge was small because I used very little space on the S3 server. (See the bill). If I had used more, the charge would have been greater, but it still would have been quite cheap, and, as you say, maintained and of unlimited capacity.

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  4. Are you still using Jungle Disk, and if so, what has been your experience?

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  5. Yes, I am still using it, though not a lot. It seems to work fine, it has never crashed as far as I know, and the bills are minuscule, though I don't have much out there. If I did not have servers at school, I would use it a lot more.

    They now charge $20 for the client, but you can use it on all the machines you want to.

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