Amazon is Amazing... Most of the Time

Again and again I'm really amazed at Amazon. I discovered Amazon S3 a few months ago, and was really impressed with the service. For mere pennies a month, you can have literally an unlimited amount of "cloud" storage. Phenomenal. After using the service for a while, I realized that they allow you to name an S3 bucket a domain name, and if the DNS Zone File of that domain contains an A record that points to Amazon's AWS servers, your bucket will automatically be available at that domain. This is amazing. [media.kennethreitz.com is actually an S3 Bucket]

A few other services allow you to do this and I've never seen it go wrong: Amazon S3 and Cloud Front, Posterous, Tumblr, and Blogger, to name a few. [http://posts.kennethreitz.com is a Posterous site].

After being blown away by the offering of unlimited storage, I was introduced to unlimited computing power: Amazon EC2. All I can say is about this is this is every Hacker's dream come true. I mean seriously. I can instantly command 500 Xeon-powered linux machines to do whatever I like for an hour, and then suddenly have them all disappear off the grid and it will cost me a total of about $10. Seriously. Wow.

All excuses are now gone. The possibilities are limitless. Why aren't more people taking advantage of this wonderful service?

I then was introduced to their Affiliate program. If you provide a link to an Amazon.com sales listing, and someone purchases something from your link, you will receive a percentage of that sale. Genius! Screw using Google Adwords, this is a great idea. I did a few tests on Twitter. I posted one link, and within about 15 minutes, I had over 100 clicks to the Amazon listing.

I'm pretty surprised at what i've read recently, however. Apparently Amazon doesn't want you to use their affiliate links on mobile devices? What a missed opportunity. I wonder why this is? It must be some legal issues... I mean, Amazon makes money from affiliate links - why would they want to limit them?

Leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.