I just listened to very lively and well produced TalkCrunch podcast from Tech crunch about Amazon’s S3 service and online storage in general.

I am very excited to see some great S3 applications, but the pricing is still way too high. All the online storage solutions seem out of touch with other bandwidth/storage pricing.

For example, Dreamhost offers 20gb of storage and a terabyte of bandwidth per month for $9.95. $7.95 if you commit to two years. In addition your alloted storage and bandwidth increase every week.

Assuming you used the full capacity, the same service through S3 would cost:

20 * .15 = $5.00

1000 * .20 = $200

Total $205

About $195 a month more that a basic hosting account. Even if you only use a tenth of the bandwidth S3 is still off by a factor of 3. What is more, as mentioned in the podcast, S3 appears to the be the low cost online storage provider. The other providers are off by even more.

A real opportunity exists in building an ftp/http/webdav backup utility. Something like Apple’s .mac Backup application.

Or maybe an open source online storage front end that can run on any ISP’s Apache server. Host your own OmniDrive.