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Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
•Highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage
•Simple interface: put/get blob (1 byte to 5 GB)
•Accessible via web services API
•Rock-solid availability (99.99%) and durability (no loss)
•Pricing
–Storage: $0.15 / GB / month
–Upload Transfer: $0.10 / GB Upload
–Download Transfer:
•$0.18 / GB (first 10TB / month)
•$0.16 / GB (next 40TB / month)
•$0.13 / GB (everything above 50TB / month)
–Put / List requests: $0.01 per 1,000
–Get / Head requests: $0.01 per 10,000
Distributed object-store, when you write an object it gets replicated across several storage nodes (server) and across at least two data centers.  The reason we do this is to meet availability and durability modes.  If hard drive crashes data is on several servers so you can still access it, a server can go down, a data center could do down, or a network split and S3 is designed to perform despite these failures.  If a hard drive crashes S3 detects it and knows what objects were replicated on that drive and instantly makes a new replica somewhere else in the system.
Of course this all happens under the covers and as an application developer you don’t need to worry about these failures.  From your perspective you see a highly available and durable data store.
API is very simple.  Get, Put, Delete object….
Most folks take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to integrate with S3—either complex existing internet sites all the way to brand new startups.