We, as an SMB (small and medium business), have been using Amazon’s S3 for sometime now. We are a small software development company that specializes in web applications. We also host web applications and sites. The benefit of S3 is it gives us the ability to keep complete off-site back-ups as well as share certain files with outside contractors and clients.

This probably isn’t anything earth shattering to most, but it certainly beats our old system of taking back-up tapes and DVD off-site every night. That method had too many short-comings to say the least.

Recently, for one of our secure document storage web applications, we started incorporating a data provider that utilizes the S3 API. Setting a search provider for S3 proved to be a bit of a challenge, but so far it has worked out fairly well.

So lets get back to the topic at hand. For the SMB looking for a cost effective way to keep file storage organized and highly available, I’m hard pressed to come up with another viable solution. If you’re the owner of a SMB or work for one, what options have you explored? What method of [off-site] back-up are you using? I’d really like to hear from you…