One of the most visible online backup providers is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Many online backup vendors utilize Amazon S3 to provide their own solutions, acting as VARs for the market. Because pricing plans vary significantly across vendors, the pricing in this note cannot be considered universal; however, because of S3's ubiquity, we will use it as the baseline for pricing scenarios.
What You Pay For
As outlined on the Amazon Web Services Web site, some of the functionality includes:
- Number of data objects that can be stored is unlimited; however, no one item can exceed 5GB in size.
- Data is retrieved using an assigned key that is unique to each customer.
- Data can be categorized as private or public (to the individual company, not to all S3 customers) and can be configured to be accessible to certain users, as the enterprise requires.
- Currently supports HTTP as the default. BitTorrent is available when low cost, high-distribution concerns are deemed appropriate.
