If you are really serious about ‘getting into the cloud’, Amazon.com has a relatively simple way for you to get your stuff uploaded… Just send them your harddrive.
Mail Your Hard Drive to Amazon
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/07/mail-your-hard-drive-to-amazon.php
We have written before about a little-known facet of AWS, the ability to ship your physical hard drive off to that Big Cloud in Seattle and have them make a copy of all your precious data and put it in their cloud.
Up until now, your data had to reside on an S3 raw storage account, which made it harder to incorporate into a machine image on AWS. That has changed as of today, and your contents can be imported to AWS’ Elastic Block Storage, which is a lot easier to manipulate in the AWS solar system. Once your drive is uploaded, you can create a volume based on the EBS snapshot and attach it to a VM, or share it with others.
The cost is reasonable: you pay $80 per drive, plus the time it takes them to make the copy. This avoids slow (or even reasonably fast) Internet connections, and Amazon will send you back their drive once they are done. A TB disk would cost about $120 as an example, and there is a pricing calculator so you can see what to expect.
AWS Import/Export Service Makes It Easier to Move Data To and From Amazon S3
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/06/aws-importexport-service-makes.php
Amazon Web Services announced today that their AWS Import/Export service to help move data in and out of Amazon S3 would be more widely available. The service was launched in a limited beta in May, and today opens to anyone, along with an API and a web interface so that customers can check on the status of their data transfer.
AWS Import/Export accelerates transferring large amounts of data between the AWS cloud and portable storage devices. These storage devices are mailed to Amazon, bypassing an Internet upload in order to use Amazon’s internal high-speed network to move the data.
As Amazon notes, the Internet is insufficient for the transfer of large data sets, and even with a mail-in service, Amazon claims its "Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity." As Amazon noted when it announced the service, "it would take over 80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection."
The service costs $80 per storage device handled, along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour fee. Storage devices are returned to the owner after transfer.
