OR removed from page   I removed the following section due to its entirely being original research and speculation Per s request here it is  The implementation details of S are not documented but it is possible to infer aspects of it from the behaviour and pricing of the service   There is an S repository in the US there is another in Europe Their locations are not public  From an EC server read access can initially be slow This could imply that S data is not always in the same physical location as all the EC servers   Amazon do not bill for data transferred between the US EC server farm and the US S store but they do for access between the servers and the European S store While the S store and the EC servers may be in separate locations they must be close enough together that cost of transferring data is neglible Both services are presumably hosted on the same Metropolitan Area Ethernet  Connectivity between the S datastores and the rest of the Internet is good This implies they  are close to one of the main Internet exchanges  After the initial slow access later accesses are fast This could imply that the data is cached  Write access is tangibly slower than writing to a local hard disk Amazon guarantee that when the operation has completed data has been written to disk in multiple locations   Amazon warn that even after data has been written old values may still be read This implies that there can be more than one cache of the data and that every GET request does not trigger a check from the frontend caches to the backend store  Amazon adjusted their initial pricing from a simple flat rate per GB to one that charges small frequently retrieved items per thousand GET or HEAD operations rather than purely per byte There may be a flat cost for every entry indexing billing entries and a perrequest cost in CPUtime for every access These fixed overheads are now billed for  The dynamic perbucket DNS entries are implemented by having a custom S DNS server that returns a hostname for every host under the samazonawscom subdomain even if a bucket of that name has never been created    nslookup madeupnameforwikipediasamazonawscom  Nonauthoritative answer madeupnameforwikipediasamazonawscom     canonical name  sdirectionalwamazonawscom sdirectionalwamazonawscom  canonical name  swamazonawscom Name   swamazonawscom Address    At the identified host there is a web server that always serves up  error pages when a GET request against a nonexistent bucket is issued    telnet madeupnameforwikipediasamazonawscom   Trying  Connected to swamazonawscom Escape character is  GET  HTTP host madeupnameforwikipediasamazonawscom  HTTP  Not Found xamzrequestid FFEF xamzid gTYmUaEZXImFNvGGThAreKnCEfXpoJpthwuqPmRRcThAdBaXsLj ContentType applicationxml Date Wed  Feb   GMT Connection close Server AmazonS   NoSuchBucket The specified bucket does not exist FFEF madeupnameforwikipedia gTYmUaEZXImFNvGGThAreKnCEfXpoJpthwuqPmRRcThAdBaXsLj  Connection closed by foreign host    Notice how the XML error text is intended for machine interpretation rather than end users The RequestId element can be used in support requests as Amazon log every request at least for a few days