Amazon S3 — oh the cost!
So I thought I'd have a play with the cloud and signed up for Amazon's S3 "simple storage service". Easy registration, nice and quick, too. Downloaded Cloudberry Explorer and logged in to the system. A few files were uploaded, a few downloaded and links tested left, right, and centre. All worked perfectly, I was most impressed.
But how much was it really going to cost? I mean the amount that actually appeared on my credit card and not some under-estimated sum that someone in Amazon's marketing department thought they could just about get away with quoting. No minimum amount was being bandied about and after a few Google searches I couldn't find anything to doubt that. So I uploaded some more, including some HD video, and nervously looked at the Total Charges Due section on the Amazon AWS website. 5 cents. Yes, you did read that right, just $0.05 as the anticpated cost for the whole month. I was doubtful and come the end of the first month awaited the real world bill that was going to pop up on my card.
Nothing. Nothing happened: no charge, no demand for payment, nothing. Except that looking at my online statement there was a note in red on it that said I was forgiven: "Amount forgiven June 4th $0.05 " And the same the next month. Confused, I Googled. Turns out that a lot of credit card providers won't accept an amount that's under $1.00 so although Amazon try to bill me, they can't. Personally, I'd have been happy for them to let it accrue or to charge a nominal sum up front and deuct it from that, but no, that's not what they do. So, it appears, that until I seriously ramp up my using of the Amazon S3 service, by a factor of twenty, then it rather seems that it's free. How odd, but how wonderful, too.
Feel free, Amazon, to find a way to take my money (I have PayPal, but you don't take that, do you) but until you do I'm most happy with S3 and shall continue to use it with your compliments.
Update:
Amazon eventually got cross and threatened to delete my account for an outstanding balance of approximately $0.10. So I made a manual payment using the same card that they'd been unable to collect from and now it seems there's no problem as either rules have changed or my credit card company is now playing ball — so now the monthly payment is working fine, which is a situation I much prefer. Even from smallscale business usage, I've yet to pay more than $0.12 in any one month. As IT costs go, this one's bearable!
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