Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3 for short, is a personal cloud storage service from Amazon’s Web Services (Amazon AWS). Amazon S3 debuted in 2006 as a cost-effective Web services solution for developers to store and retrieve data at any point in time from anywhere Web access is available.
Amazon S3 customers receive up to 5 GB of online data storage for free, with commercial tiered plans available for those with additional storage or more intensive data transfer needs. In addition to its use for personal cloud storage, Amazon S3 has also become increasingly utilized by commercial services for cloud services, with companies like Dropbox, Ubuntu One and SmugMug relying on Amazon S3 for cloud storage and transfer.
