Lot of fluff flying around on the Intarwebs today about S3 dropping it’s basic price down to 12.5 cents/gb for Standard Storage. It’s great that they’ve lowered prices… but S3 was already kind of a bargain to begin with.

So, let’s pretend for a second you don’t grow hardware on trees like Facebook or Google do, and see what you get for 12.5 cents/gb:

• Practically infinitely scalable storage.
• Object versioning.
• An ACL scheme with file-level granularity.
• A file-size limit of 5 terabytes.
• A REST interface to work with.
• An SLA that gives you 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability.
• Cross-datacenter replication.
• $0 minimum cost.
• Built-in CDN integration (CloudFront).
• No need to administer your own array.
• No 3am runs to the data center to replace drives.
• No worrying about capacity growth.
• No network cables.
• No hardware to maintain, at all.

Beat that with your own racked iron. Go ahead, I dare you.