Amazon S3 and Ruby on Rails

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

From a couple perspectives, I find it tough to beat Amazon S3 for storage of many file assets (esp web developer related file assets). The value and ease of use is very good, especially with regards to file assets that you want to reach from multiple locations and also assets that outlast a machine's lifetime (say, > 3 years). I personally much prefer to store data on a network, where I can access it from anywhere, anytime, even programatically. Likewise, Amazon handles all redundancy, all backups, etc. As a longer term goal, I would like to automate an effective rsync of some data on my local machine to my S3 repository... open to ideas there if anyone wants to post them here or email me.

For those interested (and too lazy to clink on the link above!), here are the costs as of today:

Amazon Simple Storage Service

Pricing

Storage

* $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer

* $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
* $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
* $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
* $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer in and out refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.

Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge.
Requests

* $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
* $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*

* No charge for delete requests

Storage and bandwidth size includes all file overhead


Here is a great link related to using S3 programatically with Rails:

Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=608&categoryID=55