When it comes to cloud hosting of your data, Amazon has you covered. With numerous options, it's safe to say you'll find a solution that fits your needs. But how well do they perform, and what makes them different?
Let's take a look at a few different cloud hosting solutions from Amazon: Cloud Drive; Kindle Cloud Reader; and Amazon Web Services.
Amazon Cloud Drive
This cloud hosting service stemmed from Amazon's Cloud Player, and offers you 5GB of free storage allowing you access to your important documents from wherever you are using a PC or your Kindle Fire. If you compare this with other services, it offers the same amount of free storage as Google Drive, and less than Microsoft's SkyDrive which provides up to 7GB of free storage. Although it gives you a handy way of storing your files online, there are tools you might miss that are offered in both Google and Microsoft's services.
Want more storage? Many plans are offered, up to 1000GB for $500 per year. Store music in your Amazon Cloud Player account without touching your storage in your Cloud Drive. Also, if you have an Amazon account, you have a Cloud Drive account, accessed by clicking the Cloud Drive menu on the Amazon home page.
It is easy to select and upload files from your machine, and while the files are transferring, you will see a progress bar showing you how long you have until the process completes. Upload files up to 2GB. Download files to your machine by simply double-clicking or clicking the ‘Download' button. If you double-click a MOV, MP3, or AAC file, it will play instead of downloading. A photo, upon downloading, appears in the browser immediately.
This is a great service in terms of storing files, but lacks things like security and privacy.
Kindle Cloud Reader
Kindle Cloud Reader stores your library of Kindle e-books and makes them available in your web browser. It is built on HTML5 and runs in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari 5 and higher as well as Safari for iPad.
It allows you to shop for Kindle titles through your web browser, ultimately making this content available directly on your Kindle. Any titles you delete from your Kindle Cloud Reader remains, stored in the Cloud, allowing you to restore it your Kindle Cloud Reader at a later date. Send titles in your Kindle Library easily to Kindle Cloud Reader. In order to do this, you have to register the Kindle Cloud Reader to the account you use to manage your Kindle.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS, a IaaS cloud hosting option we've discussed before, gives users a way to run just about anything in the cloud: applications, games, mobile apps, and large data projects.
There are a variety of products and services available through AWS. Let's look at some of them:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is a highly scalable cloud hosting option, offering three separate compute instances: small, large, and extra large. With small, you have 1 CPU Core, 160GB of storage for 32-bit platforms, and 1.7GB RAM. Large offers 2 virtual cores, 850GB of storage for both 64-bit and 32-bit platforms, and 7.5 GB RAM. Extra-large provides 4 virtual cores, 1.7TB of storage space for 64-bit and 32-bit platforms, and 15GB RAM. Choose between the S3 or EBS storage: S3 offers cheap, continuous storage space, while EBS offers a virtualized storage area network solution so that all the servers you rely on can share it.
- Amazon Cloud Front. This web-based service allows you to easily distribute content with high transfer speeds and low latency.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This service makes it even easier to deploy and manage your applications in the cloud. The service takes care of all details like load balancing, auto-scaling, health monitoring, and capacity provisioning. All you have to do is upload your application!
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. This lets you provision a section of the AWS Cloud privately, defining a virtual network that looks something like the network in your own datacenter.
- Amazon Glacier. We talked about S3 and EBS, but not Glacier! This gives you a low-cost storage service to securely backup and archive data.
There are many more aspects to AWS, head to their products page to view all the information.
Do you rely on one or many of these Amazon cloud hosting solutions? What do you like about it?