amazon

Looks like Amazon’s S3 is down.

I switched to using Amazon S3 to host all the graphics on my largest blog. It’s the first time they’ve gone down since I started using them, so I’m not going to be giving them a hard time - yet

I only found this today, but here’s a site where you can keep an eye on the status. Very handy and you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your particular service.

Impressively low as the data transfer cost already was for Amazon’s S3/EC2 service, they’ve announced that they’re lowering it even further.

I received an email today announcing new pricing structures:

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

I use S3 for storing the images on my FlightSimX blog. It saves a good chunk of bandwidth, is extremely fast and the cost is stupidly low. I’d recommend it to anyone.

I got an email from Amazon Associates today advising that they’ve launched a new Carousel advertising widget. I must admit, it looks pretty neat.

Here’s a live example:

I like the idea of adding interactivity to ads. I spent a good few minutes just whizzing the think around for fun! I’ll let you know what the conversions are like in a few days time.

They’ve got horizontal and vertical versions, in a number of different sizes to suit your site. What do you think of them?