I read a fascinating post about Amazon’s new text stats today (thanks Seth). Amazon provide some cool statistics comparing the sentence length, word complexity and even words per dollar of books.
It’s interesting to note that in Steven’s (admittedly unscientific) comparison, the more popular books have fewer words per sentence and less complex words. I’m reassured that I’m not the only person who prefers simpler texts.
I didn’t make it past the first page of my brother’s dissertation because of the academic style. I realise it’s what’s expected, even required, of academic writing, but personally, I find it unbearable. Apparently the numbers agree, simplicity sells!
Amazon EC2 has added two new instance types. Their standard instance has 1 virtual CPU and 1.7Gb of RAM for 10c (USD) per hour. The newly launched Large Instance has 4 virtual CPU cores (2 cores x 2 CPUs) and 7.5Gb of RAM for 40c per hour. The massive Extra Large Instance has a whopping 8 virtual CPU cores (2 cores x 4 CPUs) and a 15Gb of RAM for 80c an hour.
One of the beauties of the system is you can bring appliances on and off-line as you need them. You can even script your application to enlarge itself. However, the system is not without it’s drawbacks.
Amazon S3 is a static file hosting service from Amazon. Storage costs $0.15 USD per Gb and data transfer (outgoing) costs $0.18 USD per GB up to 10TB. As an online backup solution, it would cost less than $20 / month to store 100Gb, assuming you’re not uploading / downloading more than 20% every month.
That’s pretty cheap by backup standards. But for commercial static file hosting, it’s insanely cheap. Particularly given the fact that it will scale from a few GBs today, to several TBs tomorrow.
I currently spend $5.40 / month for 3Gb of online backup with rsync.net. I might consider switching to Amazon S3, although probably not for my daily backups because I get unlimited bandwidth on rsync.net and top notch support. For image archiving on the other hand, it looks very tempting.
The best thing, there’s no minimum spend. You don’t have to commit to spend hundreds of dollars to benefit from enterprise class storage.
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