So, naturally you're wondering about the ongoing costs for hosting your Zarqon Licenses from S3.

The Zarqon License is about as reasonably priced as one can imagine, but will you go broke in fees from Amazon Web Services? Absolutely not! In fact, it would be very tough to find a better deal.

Lets get a sense of the storage requirement:

Zarqon Licenses and Products are pretty small; taking up about 2k or less each.

• 1 GB =1024*1024*1024 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes
• Thus, 1GB represents about 1073741824/2048 = 524,288 Zarqon Licenses!
• The private License Holder bucket and the public (but encrypted) Licenses bucket both have a copy of the License, so required storage is twice that.
• The product description storage and transfer is negligible since a single product takes up only about 2k; it is the Licenses and License Holders that take up space. It is also only transferred when you edit it, which is rarely if ever after the initial definition.

What does storage cost?

Amazon S3 Storage is based on what you use each month, not a pre-allotted 'plan'. We're continue with our estimate below, but you can also view the S3 Pricing Page for more details.

• S3 storage for the first 50 TB in the US Standard region is 15 cents per GB
• That means about 30 cents per month for 524,288 Zarqon Licenses

What are the transfer costs?

Amazon S3 Transfer Out is also usage based, and it is your customers' license validation requests that you will be paying for mostly. Transfers occurring as a matter of your maintenance operations will be negligible.

• Amazon has just announced that starting April 1, 2010, the first 1 GB of data transferred out per month is FREE!
• Thus, the first 500k license validation requests from users of your application costs you nothing!
• The remainder of first 10TB per month is only 15 cents per GB
  
• So, every set of 500k license validations after your first 500k cost you 15 cents.

Bringing it all Together...

Assume you have 500,000 licensed users and they all launch your app 50 times per month, you'd pay roughly:

• Monthly Storage = $0.30
• Monthly Transfer = $0.15 x 49 = $24.50
• Monthly TOTAL = $24.70

The Alternatives...

Sure you could probably find cheap web hosting for that, but...

• You'd have to install and manage some server software to store and retrieve your licenses
• Be sure that software (and its database) was defensible against all manner of exploits.
• Settle for whatever bottom-feeder priority your processes are given when there are thousands of other virtual hosts running on the same machine chewing up bandwidth and cycles.
• Probably not get a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that comes with credit for outage. See Amazon S3's SLA
• Not be hosted by one of the web's most mature, reliable, secure and well known cloud platforms.

Or you could go with a vendor whose licensing scheme is based on them hosting and serving your licenses, in which case you...

• Just have to trust that they are reliable and secure ( Amazon OR xyz.com, hmmm.... )
• Share a percentage of your licenses with them and/or
• Pay them a monthly or yearly fee

With Zarqon, its just you, a reliable, secure and inexpensive cloud host with no server side software requirements, and your users. It's that simple.