Virtual Logistics Services

One of the fascinating services offered by Amazon to business owners is the Amazon S3 system. The system lets businesses sell products on the web but stock and ship their goods at Amazon’s warehouses. The Epicenter blog has a write up of a speech given at ETech by one entrepreneur who runs SmugMug and thinks that the service saved his business almost a million dollars:

All the data goes to S3, then Smugmug keeps the data they need to use. Vast majority of stuff coming out of hot data.

“We saw a 95 percent reduction in the hard disks we bought. All secondary gone. Cut primary enormously.”

Amazon is pretty close to 100 percent reliable, he says. S3 is more reliable than the stuff we control ourselves. The failures aren’t always Amazon’s fault. A fiber cut between me and Amazon, for example.

And the customers couldn’t tell where they were coming from and they are very sensitive to the speed. They like knowing Amazon has their data. They trust the brand and are comfortable with the idea, MacAskill says.

Epicenter – Wired News: