For S3, it's not what most of the customers think they're buying, but what Amazon is actually selling is a storage service with 11 nines of durability:
It's "Simple Storage Service", and it does that one thing (storing practically unlimited amounts of objects) spectacularly well. Like 11 nines well. It doesn't do "inexpensive egress charges" well. Amazon never claimed that though.
I think a lot of people don't care about those 11 nines, and would love to buy something with perhaps only 5 or 4 nines of durability ("Maybe I'll need to upload it again once every few years, that's cool!") but which optimises for cheap bandwidth costs instead. Right now, I think that thing is an inexpensive VPS with an unlimited traffic (Hetzner were offering "unlimited traffic at 1GB/sec for the first 20TB, then throttled to 100MB/sec" for under 10EUR/month last time I went looking. And they're well above "the bottom of the barrel" pricing in cheap VPS land.)
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#Durability_.26_Data_Protecti...
It's "Simple Storage Service", and it does that one thing (storing practically unlimited amounts of objects) spectacularly well. Like 11 nines well. It doesn't do "inexpensive egress charges" well. Amazon never claimed that though.
I think a lot of people don't care about those 11 nines, and would love to buy something with perhaps only 5 or 4 nines of durability ("Maybe I'll need to upload it again once every few years, that's cool!") but which optimises for cheap bandwidth costs instead. Right now, I think that thing is an inexpensive VPS with an unlimited traffic (Hetzner were offering "unlimited traffic at 1GB/sec for the first 20TB, then throttled to 100MB/sec" for under 10EUR/month last time I went looking. And they're well above "the bottom of the barrel" pricing in cheap VPS land.)