Amazon requires huge data centers and high-speed Internet connections to run its systems.
Through vast economies of scale, Amazon is able to achieve incredibly low prices for data
storage and bandwidth. Around 2005, the company decided that it could leverage those low
costs into a new business selling Internet-based services. The company offers an online data
storage service called S3. For a monthly fee of about 15 cents per gigabyte stored plus 15
cents per gigabyte of data transferred, any person or company can transfer and store data
on Amazon servers [Markoff 2006].