Storage Services - Cheaper And More Reliable Hosting?

In a trend that’s changing the landscape of hosting companies like Amazon.com and Google have provided services which allow you to store data on their distributed networks. They’re called file hosting services but the possibilities are a bit more expansive than that. I’ll come back to the details of these two services later but to illustrate how they are being used Tom Evslin has detailed how he has used Amazon’s S3 hosting service to host a fully functional web application. While it’s not possible to use traditional development tools like the lamp stack  it is possible to write applications that don’t require a database and feasible to store data in XML files which are accessed using javascript code on the client side. These hosting services might not replace traditional hosting services anytime soon they certainly have their place.

In order to better understand these hosting services and to get an idea of why they are attractive here are some details on the two major players Google and Amazon.

Google App Engine

It’s the google network infrastructure with a pay as you grow pricing structure. If you’re a developer then you can use their hosting service apis which leverage the python language. So instead of paying a monthly fee that you may or may not be taking advantage of you play a small price for cpu cycles, bandwidth, etc.

Amazon S3

It’s a bit less complicated than Google’s app engine but Amazon has provided an api that anyone can access to create interfaces to their api. The EZS3 service parks itself on top of the API and allows you to easily access your S3 storage. Looking at S3 hosting from a marketing point of view it makes a lot of sense to host your video on their servers rather than on traditional hosting services.

It’s becoming less and less important which programming language you use in the background given the popularity and exponential growth of ajax libraries. A programmer could simply create an ajax interface that reads and writes data to and from XML files hosted on either of these hosting services and at the same time provide a feature rich and modern web application.