EC2 and S3

Great, the computer industry is famous for its crazy acronyms and now to confuse us all they're chucking numbers in there too.

Thankfully the latest from Amazon, S3 (Simple Storage Service ) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) translate to readily understandable names that the rest of us can at first glance get what they're on about.

EC2 has particularly grabbed my attention as it has basically shaken up the hosting market and changed the rules. In the era of Web 2.0 we are now seeing the emergence of sites that are generating high traffic rates straight out of the blocks. This is great, but quite a headache for the two kids that have hijacked their flat or parent's cable plan to run a dedicated server to save costs. The only reason they did this was cause getting a dedicated server was too expensive. Any real geek wants full control of their server so virtual hosting is not an option.

But now with the emergence of EC2 and S3 from Amazon we are seeing that the cost of getting a fully fledged server up and running the way you want it is really cheap.

There are examples floating around on the Net of monthly hosting using EC2 and S3 costing $80US a month for running something pretty decent (lots of traffic), so thats about $NZ105. I think thats pretty awesome, cause a dedicated box in a reliably supported NZ data center is going to set you back at least $500 per month (I said reliably supported).