Amazon goes into the online data storage business

Yep. See here for details.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Costs? You pay only for what you use. $0.15 per GB-month of storage used; $.20 per GB of data transferred.

Oh, and here’s a handy front end.