Comments on: Amazon announces planned S3 pricing change

By: Jungle Dave

Jungle Dave — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:22:19 +0000

I don’t expect any more changes in the near term. In the long term, I expect prices to come down as the storage itself gets cheaper and competition comes into the market.

By: Art

Art — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:00:00 +0000

Any speculations regarding future S3 pricing? I’m backing up 122GB of family photos using Jungle disk right now - so this is not a theoretical question
Guess I’m trying to get a sense of possible future scale economies regarding grid storage……..

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 20:48:07 +0000

ricobird,

It’s not that complicated. And most of the blame for your confusion should fall on Amazon. This blog post is simply pointing out how Amazon now calculates your charges.

You pay (or will pay–it’s currently free) a small $20 fee to JungleDisk, the developer of the software. From there on out, all fees go to Amazon for the use of their S3 system, which provides the back end to JungleDisk.

Yes, Amazon has somewhat complicated the pricing structure for use of their system, but it’s still one bill (so no separate “fees to Amazon, fees to store, fees to recover, S3 pricing”–it’s all the same, and it’s all quite cheap; I’m paying about a buck a month and I’ve got something like 15GB on JD). JungleDave has made it about as simple as Amazon will allow.

However, I agree that for new people, the process of signing up for Amazon S3 and copying the account keys into JD is somewhat complicated; perhaps someday, JungleDave, you can simplify it for new people and handle account creation and billing for them (maybe making a small 2% markup for the convenience and leaving the option to use your own S3 account for those of us who are more familiar with these things).

As for me, I’m still waiting for ISPs to realize that there is a market for consumer-priced higher-speed upload connections (my ISP only offers anything faster than 384kbps to businesses willing to buy T1s or $400 cable modem connections) before I can fully utilize JD. Until then, I’m still looking at getting another external drive for backup and archival purposes…

By: Willem

Willem — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 19:39:41 +0000

RICOBIRD:

There is no excuse for anybody concerned about backing up data not to try out JD/S3. It is VERY INEXPENSIVE to test uploading, storing and retrieving hundreds of files.

Over the past 4 months of my tests, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has charged me only about 11 cents a month. And I had about a gigabyte of data up there.

Once you see this in operation, you will appreciate how common sense and easy this is.

By: ricobird

ricobird — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:44:03 +0000

I know that we SHOULD backup. But for a newbie this system seems very complicated. Fees to JD, fees to Amazon, fees to store, fees to recover, S3 pricing, on and on! Can’t you simplify the whole storage system? For computer geeks, there is no problem! But, for the rest of us…OY VAY!!! I’ll pass until I can figure out your system!!!!

By: Jungle Dave

Jungle Dave — Sun, 06 May 2007 22:45:56 +0000

There will be a basic Linux CLI version in the next release.

By: Around the web | alexking.org

Around the web | alexking.org — Sun, 06 May 2007 21:57:04 +0000

[…] Amazon announces planned S3 pricing change - might my $.57/month bill spike to $.65/month? […]

By: Garth Kidd

Garth Kidd — Sun, 06 May 2007 01:40:53 +0000

The more you do to save round-trips to S3, the faster JungleDisk will seem. Those EC2 boxes look more and more useful every day, huh?

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 05 May 2007 07:40:16 +0000

Hi JD,

Any news on the Linux CLI client? Really looking forward to that.

By: Colin Henderson

Colin Henderson — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:27:36 +0000

Thanks JD for looking out for us. I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything other than JD and S3 for backups.