Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Amazon launched S3, its first publicly-available web service, in the United States in March 2006 and in Europe in November 2007. Since its inception, Amazon has charged end users US$0.15 per gigabyte-month, with additional charges for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data, and a per-request (get or put) charge. As of November 1, 2008, pricing moved to tiers where end users storing more than 50 terabytes receive discounted pricing. Amazon claims that S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network. Amazon S3 is reported to store more than 102 billion objects as of March 2010. This is up from 64 billion as of August 2009, 52 billion objects as of March 2009, 29 billion objects as of October 2008, 14 billion objects as of January 2008, and from 10 billion in October 2007. S3 uses include web hosting, image hosting, and a back-up system. S3 comes with a 99.9% monthly uptime guarantee.
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