The New Economy: 4 cents

Peter Rukavina

Last week I mentioned here that I’d set up a backup of the Elections PEI results website using the Amazon S3 storage service. The idea was that if all hell broke loose bandwidth-wise on our local server, we could redirect traffic there.

As it turns out, the server hummed along just fine so we didn’t need to flip any switches. Today I got the bill for the Amazon S3 setup:

Email snipshot

Total cost: 4 cents. That’s not a misprint. There are no up-front “registration” or “setup” costs for S3 — you pay for storage, and you pay for bandwidth. In this case the bill broke down to 1 cent for the storage used — 956K for 3 days — and 3 cents for the bandwidth used, 0.110 GB, which represents simply the traffic from the minute-by-minute updates up the HTML pages on the S3 server.

Needless to say, this is a significant example of (a) how S3 rocks and (b) how the barriers to entry for almost anything on the web now are perception, imagination, creativity and sweat. In other words, if you’ve got something to say, you’ve no excuse, at least not a financial one, not to say it now.

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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