Excellent post. Keep it up!…

What I observe is that most people treat Amazon S3 as a content delivery service. While this is not inherently wrong, one has to notice that S3 was especially designed to be a STORAGE service.

The point is, since terrabyte hard drives are affordable nowadays and internet traffic grows steadily, the stress goes on content delivery rather than on storage. If you are not concerned about storage, there are much better services especially suited for content delivery.

SteadyOffload.com provides an innovative, subtle and convenient way to offload static content. The whole mechanism there is quite different from Amazon S3. Instead of permanently uploading your files to a third-party host, their cachebot crawls your site and mirrors the content in a temporary cache on their servers. Content remains stored on your server while it is being delivered from the SteadyOffload cache. The URL of the cached object on their server is dynamically generated at page loading time, very scrambled and is changing often, so you don’t have to worry about hotlinking. This means that there is an almost non-existent chance that the cached content gets exposed outside of your web application.

It’s definitely worth trying because it’s not a storage service like S3 but exactly a service for offloading static content.

Watch that:

http://video.google.com/videop.....7634099306 (the video shows integration with WordPress, but it is integrable with any other webpage)

http://www.steadyoffload.com/

http://codex.wordpress.org/Wor.....Offloading

Cost of bandwidth comes under $0.2 per GB - affordable, efficient and convenient. Looks like a startup but lures me very much. Definitely simpler and safer than Amazon S3.

http://www.nirvanix.com

friarminor
http:morphexchange.com

But you can get cloud and utility computing with three or four nines out of the box (and many more with some simple configuration additions), and, have it on completely non-proprietary infrastructure, supporting multi-tier applications, including complex relational databases, by using a hosting provider that offers 3tera’s AppLoogic. Check out our web site. –BXL–

UNTIL:

There were four accounts that were mashed up…the usual suspects, and one of them went dark. We did some pinging (here is a good business idea for a bright Web20 person, third party app monitoring and governance) and isolated the guilty party.

In spite of being punked, fingered, whatever, the slacker who ran the service were very rude and unforthcoming. That’s another problem: who are you going to deal with when these hosted services go down? I’m not so sure if it was SalesForce that crapped out, that it would have been better.

Long and short of it: we have a business community that is used to local control, we consultants want to deliver apps as a service - we will need to ally ourselves with the providers of these services to come up with a game plan…but try and get one of the stars to cough up a retainer!

Most of the startup SaaS guys laugh when I propose a contract to consult on packaging and policies for reliability for the SMB end users.

But this is exactly what they should want, guys like me who beat the bushes for them.

Amazon can compensate for 2 hours downtime with 3 months of perfect service and get 99.9%. To get 99.999% they’d need perfect service for over 20 years (http://tinyurl.com/279xkl).