of ephemeral value...

It looks like Amazon have come up with the first sensibly priced remote storage service. They have called it S3. It is 15 cents per gig. per month, and a 20 cent per gig charge for transfer into or out of the storage. The nice thing about this is that you charged for exactly the amount of storage you are using and not in preset big chunks that other services have. Also other services are only reasonably priced for very small amounts of data, usually measured in single digit gigabytes.

It will be interesting to see what the API is like. They are talking about REST and SOAP, but I would like to be able to rsync to it also.

I found this comment on /. interesting...

When Amazon lets me pay for the storage, and have other registered users pay the bandwidth charges (plus my profit) to access my content, then they'll have an interesting business. Unless Google beats them to it.

It would indeed be an interesting business model, although thinking about what data ordinary people would like to share, photos, movies & music, it would seem that these are already covered with flickr, google video/youtube and our media, which are all free.