Amazon adds reduced redundancy option to S3

Amazon is offering a Reduced Redundancy Storage class for customers of its S3 cloud storage service, which provides a lower and cheaper "four nines reliability" for applications and stored content.

The company said that S3 had been designed never to lose data, but that some companies prefer a cheaper option to its almost faultless operation.

"The durability of an object stored in Amazon S3 is 99.999999999 per cent," said the firm in a blog post.

This means that if a customer stores 10,000 objects in S3, Amazon may lose one of them every 10 million years or so, the firm claimed.

"It is comforting to know that you can simply store your data in S3 without having to worry about backups, scaling, device failures, fires, theft, meteor strikes, earthquakes or toddlers," the blog post continued. "But wait, there's less!"

This "less" option provides durability at 99.99 per cent, and equates to one lost object per year out of 10,000 stored.

Amazon explained that lost data will return an HTTP 405 message reading: 'Method not allowed', at which point it will be up to the customer to replace it.

Reduced Redundancy Storage pricing starts at US$0.10 per gigabyte per month, which Amazon said is about a third cheaper than the more "durable" storage options.