Devs respond to Amazon Glacier

Amazon has announced Amazon Glacier, which it calls a "low-cost storage service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup". Optimised for infrequently accessed data, the service has pricing that starts from $0.01 per gigabyte per month, and comes as a reaction to companies over-paying for data archiving. Amazon noted in its press release that companies are typically forced to make large upfront payments and guess at capacity requirements, resulting in over-provision. By contrast, Amazon Glacier is affordable and scalable.

The question is whether it's of any use to web developers beyond pure storage. Klint Finley for Wired already asked if there was a landmine hidden in Amazon's Glacier, owing to the costs of retrieving data. Andrew Dean, developer at Cable.co.uk, reasoned that people will mostly compare Amazon's new service to Dropbox, Google Drive and Sky Drive. "I happily pay approximately £64 per year for a 100 GB Dropbox account. 100 GB with Glacier would cost less than £10 before any usage related costs," he said. "That's cheap enough that I'm certainly interested in perhaps uploading my vast music collection, as a low-cost way of hopefully protecting against data loss."

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