Amazon.com's web services can save you money.

Developing and maintaining a web based application and/or data driven website can be costly. Costs for hardware as well as the costs of maintaining secure robust computing systems can sometimes be a barrier for small/medium sized businesses. Amazon.com has developed several web services that reduce and sometimes even eliminate these costs.

Two of the web services that Cafe Silencio has worked with on various client projects are SimpleDB and S3.

SimpleDB is a database service hosted by Amazon.com. Using simpleDB in the right situation can dramatically reduce your costs. By using the Amazon.com SimpleDB web service you leave the costs of hardware, maintenance, and security with Amazon.com and their expert staff. In addition, rather than investing in hardware that you will one day grow into, you pay only for the resources you use thus your costs are relative to your stage of development. If you are creating a new application, the usage will likely start small and grow over time. Using SimpleDB allows your costs to start small and grow as your application's usage grows.

Cafe Silencio can help you determine if SimpleDB is the right solution for you and how best to implement it in your project.

Amazon.com's S3 service is a distributed file storage service that, like SimpleDB, offers a pay as you go model as well as off setting the costs of hardware, maintenance, and security. In a nutshell your files whether they be images, video, or documents are stored in Amazon.com's system and are distributed to their various data centers around the world. This is done to ensure that if one of their systems becomes unavailable for some reason, your files are still accessible from various locations. Normally implementing a distribute file system like this is very expensive and out of reach of most small and medium sized businesses.

With S3 your files are securely stored and with the appropriate credentials are available via a URL that can be used in web pages or in other applications that are able to load resources via a URL. This makes the S3 system very flexible and accessible. If for example you have a website that gets a lot of traffic and you have a lot of images and/or video files accessed by your users, your bandwidth and storage costs can quickly escalate with a traditional hosting account. However the costs of using Amazon.com's S3 storage service are low and you only pay for what you use.

Cafe Silencio has the experience and expertise to help you determine how you can best take advantage of these and other exciting technologies which are leveling the playing field for small and medium sized businesses on the web.