A couple of readers pinged me about Xdrive versus S3 (Amazon) and Googlebase. S3 is competitive at $0.15/GB and $0.20/GB transferred. Googlebase is free but Google crawls your info. I still haven’t gotten over the creapy experience of reading an email in Gmail (say a friends Caribbean trip) and seeing Caribbean ads served up by Google. Sign me up for a paid model. I don’t necessarily trust that S3, at the end of the day, will maintain privacy as much as I would like. AOL’s privacy policy (minus the bone-headed search fiasco) is straight forward regarding user content like email and this applies to Xdrive as well. Lastly, there are services like Box.net and Streamload (now MediaMax) that also have compelling offers but I have more faith (fingers crossed) that AOL will be around in the long run with my data versus some of the independents.
Lot of interesting posts on S3 and EC2 which are Amazon’s Online Storage and On-demand computing offerings. They have been so well covered in the Blogosphere that you don’t need to hear my two cents on them. However, EC2 offers a new chapter in web development and a number of start-ups are taking advantage of it. Feel free to Google them…
Incidentally it’s EC2, not EC3. (It stands for Elastic Compute Cloud.)