Amazon is probably the most important shopping site on the internet. When it was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, it was just a marketplace for books. But it quickly became much more than that. Today, Amazon is a multinational company involved in many business areas, including e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence (see Wikipedia).
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS provides many services, but the Simple Storage Service (S3) is probably the coolest one. From my perspective, the Simple Storage Service provides much better cloud storage than most other services. Sure, cloud services like Dropbox are easy to use, easier than S3. But once you found the right tool, S3 is as easy to use as Dropbox. One of these tools would be the CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3, which we will introduce in one of the following posts. That tool is as easy to use as Windows Explorer.
The considerable advantage of S3 is that it aims to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency with almost 100% durability and over 99.9% availability. Another great advantage is its security features. If you like, you can create an authenticated URL for files you want to share with others that are only valid for a specified amount of time. Besides that, you can, of course, simply protect your files with passwords.
Note: Amazon S3 is not free, but I think that $0.023 per GB per month for the first 50 TB is an excellent deal.
Amazon Prime
This service is pretty much the same as Netflix. On Prime, you get millions of songs and thousands of movies and TV shows. In addition, if you signed up for Prime, many of the online orders on Amazon will come with free shipping. The price for Prime is about $9, which is about the same you would pay for Netflix. You might want to compare the available shows for both services as they don’t provide the same portfolio. You might sign up just to find out that your favorite show is only available on that other service.
And don’t forget that YouTube also provides many music videos, movies, and more. And it is entirely free.
