Amazon the web hosting company

This will probably only be interesting to 2 of the 5 people who read this blog, but Amazon just published on their Web Services blog a graph of bandwidth usage by Amazon Web Services versus ALL of their multi-national retail sites.

That’s a pretty amazing graph, if you think about it. That means more of their infrastructure’s bandwidth is being used by random companies and people (who pay them to use it) for their random websites than by Amazon the company itself.

Kudos to Amazon for being really innovative as the first large Internet site to find a business model selling their own infrastructure. As someone who’s playing with Google’s foray into this area (Google App Engine), I can say definitively that these technologies hold the possibility of dramatically changing things for small (or large) sites.