Goooaaalll! Goooaaalll! -- from Surviving World Cup Traffic to Storing Huge Image Libraries, Businesses of All Sizes Are Scoring with Cheap and Reliable Web-Scale Storage from Amazon S3

Business Editors/Technology Editors

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2006--Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN): -

- Altexa, Amazon.com, Elephant Drive, Jungle Disk, LA NACION, MediaSilo, Microsoft, and SmugMug among companies storing more than 800 million total data objects using Amazon S3 from Amazon Web Services

Early World Cup victories by Argentina triggered a flood of website traffic for the country's second-largest newspaper, LA NACION. Uncertain whether its banner ads would survive the traffic spike, LANACION.COM searched for a better solution to store and serve ads that was cheap enough not to cut into advertising profits, simple enough to get up and running immediately, and massively scalable in case the team kept winning. That's when LANACION.COM discovered Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Within hours, the site started storing ads in Amazon S3 to ease the load on its servers. After seeing how well Amazon S3 performed and how much the paper saved by using the service, LANACION.COM moved all of its ads to Amazon S3.

Nearly 7,000 miles away in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft wanted to expand its MSDN Direct Student Download program. "We needed a storage and delivery solution that made it simple, fast, and dependable for students in hundreds of countries around the world to download our software at any time," said Joe Wilson, Director of Academic Initiatives in the Developer Marketing division at Microsoft Corp. Microsoft wanted to scale the program up without any upfront or increased ongoing expenses, which is why it chose Amazon S3. Microsoft expanded the program while managing to cut storage costs by more than 90 percent since switching to Amazon S3. "In addition to being easy for our users, Amazon S3 allows us to deploy and scale up in a very cost-efficient manner," said Wilson.

Growing photo-sharing company SmugMug was on the brink of becoming the victim of its own success in early 2006. Growth was accelerating rapidly and CEO Don MacAskill was concerned his storage solution for the hundreds of millions of images SmugMug managed would not reliably or cost-efficiently meet the scaling requirements he would soon have. With just one programmer and a tight budget, SmugMug needed storage that was inexpensive, simple and reliable. "We looked at Amazon S3's pricing, design and ease-of-use, and were blown away. Amazon S3 is simple and elegant, so much so that it was basically a drop-in addition to our current infrastructure," said MacAskill. SmugMug took just five days to integrate with Amazon S3 and has saved $500,000 in storage expenditures since starting to use the service in March while adding more than 10 terabytes of images each month - all with zero increase in staff or data center space. "Amazon S3 makes it possible for SmugMug to compete with huge, deep-pocketed companies without having to raise massive amounts of cash for hardware," said MacAskill.

These examples represent the breadth of companies choosing to use the web-scale storage offered by Amazon S3. Global enterprises like Microsoft are using Amazon S3 to dramatically reduce their storage costs without compromising scale or reliability. On the opposite end of the spectrum, small but fast-growing businesses such as SmugMug that depend on storage are using Amazon S3's benefits of scale and cost-efficiency that were previously only available to large companies. Amazon.com continues to use Amazon S3 for its own business as well, recently launching new digital initiatives (described below under "Amazon.com") that store and retrieve large data files using Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3) provides a web services interface that lets businesses simply and quickly store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 uses the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. There is no minimum fee and developers pay only for what they use at a rate of just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. Amazon S3 is available from Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com), a subsidiary of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). Launched on March 14, Amazon S3 now holds more than 800 million total data objects.

"Scaling successfully is becoming a business requirement for building a business or application on the Web," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services. "We're delighted to see such a wide variety of businesses discovering that with Amazon S3 they can have web-scale storage and cut costs, without compromising reliability."

Below are other examples of businesses that are using Amazon S3:

Altexa

Altexa Software used Amazon S3 to overhaul its Altexa Backup product, which aims to make data backup an easy, automated and consistent task for consumers and small businesses. Amazon S3 replaced Altexa's in-house storage system that was becoming expensive and unreliable as their business grew. Altexa switched over to Amazon S3 in just two days and now offers its customers a storage product that costs 15 times less than competitive solutions.

"As soon as we heard about Amazon S3 we were intrigued with its possibilities for Altexa," said Altexa CEO Mark Walker. "When we learned of the pricing model and saw for ourselves its ease of use and scalability, we knew it was the best choice for Altexa. Amazon S3 has taken away the burden of back-up storage and freed-up our development team to concentrate its efforts on our product offering."

Amazon.com

Amazon.com continues to use Amazon S3 for its own business. Among the many new company initiatives and customer features using the service is "Amazon Upgrade." The new program lets customers who purchase or have previously purchased the physical copy of a book to also buy 24x7 online access to the book for approximately 10 to 20 percent more. Customers can search the entire text of the book, take notes, add highlights and bookmarks, and print specific pages from any web browser. The full content of the tens of thousands of books available through Amazon Upgrade is stored in Amazon S3. Amazon securely stores the encrypted book contents using the same Amazon S3 hardware, interface and services available to any developer.

ElephantDrive

Online storage provider ElephantDrive started using Amazon S3 as backup during its datacenter migration. The company was so pleased with Amazon S3's performance and ease of use that it quickly moved to integrate the storage solution into its regular business operations. Free to focus on marketing and sales instead of issues like storage, ElephantDrive has more than doubled its user base and quadrupled its number of digital assets since moving to Amazon S3. This growth comes with zero increase in capital costs and no concerns about reliability or scale.

"Our business plan relied in part upon the availability of massive commodity-based storage provided by an established and trustworthy enterprise. So when Amazon S3 launched, we were ecstatic. It is precisely the sort of service we anticipated, offered by precisely the kind of player we hoped to partner with," said ElephantDrive Co-Founder Ben Widhelm. "We are in the business of providing the best online storage service possible. And since Amazon S3 has enabled easy access to world-class storage, we can concentrate on delivering a world-class service."

Jungle Disk

Jungle Disk built a simple, reliable and affordable online data back-up service using Amazon S3. Amazon S3's pay-as-you-go pricing model allowed Jungle Disk to offer their customers the same benefit - to only pay for the storage they use instead of paying a flat fee for storage space that they may or may not use. The simplicity of the Amazon S3 API meant that Jungle Disk was up and running with its new service in less than 30 days from start to finish. The popularity of Jungle Disk's product has grown tremendously in the past 60 days, with thousands of customers already signed up.

"From a developer's perspective, the ease of use of Amazon S3 is a huge benefit," said Jungle Disk Lead Developer Dave Wright. "For our customers, the affordable pricing is key, as is the peace of mind they have in knowing their important data is stored with Amazon - a company they can trust to safeguard it for years to come."

MediaSilo

Digital asset management solution provider MediaSilo uses Amazon S3 because it makes their video downloads cheaper and quicker for customers. Amazon S3 allows MediaSilo to offer a service to video professionals that frees them to collaborate and manage post-production projects over the Internet without having to download any software or pay MediaSilo for costly storage. With the ability to offer its customers virtually unlimited storage at a cheap rate, MediaSilo expects to service upwards of 300 accounts with up to 50 gigabytes of data each by the end of the year.

"Amazon S3 has had a profound impact on our business," said Kai Pradel, MediaSilo president. "The business implications are significant. If we offer our subscribers large amounts of storage, we have to plan accordingly and purchase hard drive space, perform backups and regular maintenance. With Amazon S3, we pay for what we use and can shift our focus to the other important elements of our business."

Full case studies on the companies above and their use of Amazon S3 are available on the Amazon Web Services website under "Success Stories" at http://aws.amazon.com.

Other news: Amazon Simple Queue Service

Also today, Amazon Web Services released the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for developers. Amazon SQS offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Using Amazon SQS queues frees developers from worrying about how to transport or store information, allowing them to focus on building distinctive applications for their customers. Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service at extremely low cost to developers. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations, no matter where it is or when it is available. Developers can get started using Amazon SQS today at http://aws.amazon.com/sqs.

Additionally, Microsoft has built functionality for Amazon SQS that allows software developers who use the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to send their messages through Amazon SQS without having to change their application code. This functionality makes it easy for WCF applications to pass messages to other systems that are not in their network, such as remote browser-based applications and systems run by their business partners.

About Amazon Web Services LLC

Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes technology and product data from Amazon and its affiliates that enable developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own. More than 160,000 developers have signed up to use Amazon Web Services since its inception. Amazon Web Services recently launched the Solutions Catalog where developers can list the businesses, applications, and solutions they have built using Amazon Web Services. The catalog is available at http://solutions.amazonwebservices.com. Amazon Web Services LLC is an Amazon.com company.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as health and personal care, jewelry and watches, gourmet food, sports and outdoors, apparel and accessories, books, music, DVDs, electronics and office, toys and baby, and home and garden.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.joyo.com.

As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statement

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, limited operating history, government regulation and taxation, payments, fraud, consumer trends, and new business areas. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2005, and all subsequent filings. -

CONTACT:

Amazon.com

Amazon Media Hotline, 206-266-7180