or removed from page i removed the following section due to its entirely being original research and speculation per user steveloughran'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 front end caches to the back end 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 per request cost in cpu time for every access these fixed overheads are now billed for the dynamic per bucket dns entries are implemented by having a custom s dns server that returns a hostname for every host under the s amazonaws com subdomain even if a bucket of that name has never been created nslookup made up name for wikipedia s amazonaws com non authoritative answer made up name for wikipedia s amazonaws com canonical name s directional w amazonaws com s directional w amazonaws com canonical name s w amazonaws com name s w amazonaws com 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 made up name for wikipedia s amazonaws com trying connected to s w amazonaws com escape character is ' ' get http host made up name for wikipedia s amazonaws com http not found x amz request id f f ef x amz id gt ymua ezxim fnv ggthare kn cefxpojpthwuq pm rrcthadba xslj content type application xml date wed feb gmt connection close server amazons nosuchbucket the specified bucket does not exist f f ef made up name for wikipedia gt ymua ezxim fnv ggthare kn cefxpojpthwuq pm rrcthadba xslj 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