Photo: Noah Hall. Used under license.

Bizarre.

Not only does Amazon.com’s MP3 service sell 256k MP3s with no DRM at all… but it appears to work from the UK.

Order as normal. Use your amazon.co.uk username/password. Choose a credit card. It then asks you to update your address - I filled in my London address, and then chose “CA” for my state, and the ever faithful “90210″ as my ZIP code.

And I’m now the proud owner of a song (KD Tunstall, if you’re interested), for the sum of 44p instead of iTunes UK’s DRM’d 79p charge.

Amazon.com = iTunes killer.

This site, just like Media UK and my email (which shares this box), is hosted at Rackspace. And I’m quite a fan of them: they’ve provided a service with almost perfect uptime, and have saved my bacon at least once when I managed to delete a huge and complex file I parse every three months to produce scary audience figures.

Rackspace include 100Gb of bandwidth as standard, which makes sense to me. I’m currently estimated to end January on 130Gb. Additional bandwidth is charged at £3/Gb, and if I pre-purchase that goes down to £2/Gb. But, regardless, that’s £60 of bandwidth costs: not the nicest extra bill to pay. However, serving static files isn’t the best use of this server’s processor cycles anyway, so I’d been wondering how to keep the bandwidth bill down to under 100Gb.

Amazon S3 always looked interesting: a multi-hosted storage system, which required some pretty arcane software to work, but appeared to host files quite quickly.

Discovering S3 Firefox Organizer, an addon for Firefox which enables me to essentially ‘FTP’ to S3 (and make files publicly accessible), made me contemplate moving some of the static files over there - notably the JavaScript and CSS information which account for much of the site’s bandwidth. And, after looking at a really useful post at userscript.org, I plucked up the courage to do it.

Aside from a few niggles with permissions (S3 Firefox Organizer defaults to private, not public), it’s taken me an incredibly short time to configure S3 to work the way I want it.

So, this image is served off Amazon S3, rather than this server - and by tomorrow, the clunky URL of http://mediauk.s3.amazonaws.com/images/logo.png will be replaced with http://s3.mediauk.com/images/logo.png (the CNAME’s configured and propagating).

Oh. And the cost? Well, my best bandwidth cost at Rackspace is £2/Gb. The bandwidth cost at Amazon S3 is £0.10/Gb. That’s a saving of 94.9%, all in. (There is a £.07/Gb/month cost for storage, which is so low to be insignificant).

I’ve just signed up for Amazon EC2 as well, since at some point I may need some extra server grunt. While it’s not fair to directly compare Rackspace and EC2 (they’re different products and EC2 is still hurting my head), it would look like adding an extra server with Amazon EC2 (and doing what Media UK is now) would be £54 a month, rather than Rackspace’s £166 per server. (Oh, and Amazon’s virtual server compares very favourably to Rackspace’s).

Very impressive stuff. Hellishly geeky to get your head round, though…