Amazon S3 - Possible?

I've been looking at Amazon S3. Is anyone using them to host their forum's attachments?

[kmike]

I've looked into it briefly, but it's far cheaper for us to just rent the cheapest server from Softlayer with 2TB of traffic included.

[orban]

It's also "slowish" I heard, but really suited for larger files (not the typical 5-20kb attachments).

[Baldy]

I'm actually really interested in this. My company, SmugMug.com uses S3 for most of our image storage, 300 terrabytes worth, and we have a serious love affair with them. We've written blog entries and given talks at conferences about how well it works for us.

I want to do the same for the three vBulletin licenses we have, for image attachments. There must be a Linux utility somewhere to mount a directory to S3, which would be great for us. If anyone has pointers, I'd love to know about it.

Thanks,
Chris

[matt3830]

Has anyone experimented with Amazon storage yet?

[iogames]

Well, I use Xdrive.com from AOL and got 5gb free, I think is enough...

[inkpassion]

I have been helping out with a friends site and we have been exploring a basic image server but I thought this may work out as a good solution since you pay for what you use. We were going to initially use AS3 to store database backups but would be so nice to free up apache for real queries. I do not like uploading directly to Amazon and if something were to happen I want the ability revert back and run locally. I was thinking of running a sync script that would copy from local to amazon that ran every 5 min or so. What do you gusy think would be the best solution?

[mikelbeck]

I've been messing with S3 for a while... I just came across the latest beta from Jungledisk, it doesn't use DavFS and all the other crap anymore, now it just uses FUSE. You can mount S3 into your file system (I have it at /mnt/s3) and then it becomes a local resource. I've set up a script that takes the local backups and copies them to that drive once a week. It's slow, but functional. Before using this beta I was using infinitebits, which makes S3 an ftp service. That was quite a bit faster, but I think my data was going to infinitebit's server and then they were copying it over to S3 in the background.

I wouldn't think about using it as a "live" file system for storing attachments or images, it seems to be too slow for that sort of thing.