Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

Are We Competing with Amazon?

By , co-founder and CEO

As of a few minutes ago, Amazon web services launched an online storage platform for developers (thanks for the tip, Nik). Interestingly, we had been contacted by Amazon in early December to take part in an early project, which I’m now realizing was this. I turned down that offer because we were already 4 months into our new site and it was not reasonable to redesign our framework to support such a relationship. It’s definitely interesting to finally know what they were putting together.

So, the main question is, are we now competing with Amazon? In short, no. S3 is aimed at developers who want to tap into cheap storage for their applications through an open API. You see, Box.net’s storage offering is very different than this. And I quote:

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set. The focus is on simplicity and robustness.

You see, Box.net’s goal is to let sites like NetVibes.com and Goowy.com give their users a place to store their documents, photos, and files. But more importantly, since we act as a neutral back-end (and front-end), the user can move between other applications which use our storage and still have access to those same files. That is very different from what Amazon is offering. Amazon is intending their storage to act, in effect, as a web host. If you’re looking for an easy way to offload large data from your site, this would definitely be the place to go (of course you will still need a server to get the data to them).

Now that we’ve established that Amazon and Box.net are not competing against one another, you may wonder why we don’t just use their storage. Beyond reliability issues, technical limitations of the API, and the troubles of outsourcing, lies the issue of bandwidth pricing. Amazon is charging $.20/gb for upstream and downstream transfer. Here is some simple math that I just posted on techcrunch regarding the costs of a free box.net user:

Files need to pass through our servers before they are stored or distributed back to the user. This would make our bandwidth costs double (for each direction). We would be paying for Amazon’s cost, and our own. So if you wanted to store and retrieve 1GB in a month, the net effect is .40 (Amazon’s BW) +.15 (Amazon’s storage) +our BW and server costs.

Now consider sharing, where this same user needs around 10GB transfer/mo for photos/clips/files, and we end up paying $2.20+.15+our BW and server costs.

If these were our costs for an average free account, we, or anyone who offered it, would be in business for no more than two months. Uncoupling storage from the application makes it impossible to have a practical business when you’re paying for the bandwidth. All in all, this is why neither Amazon nor a web services API developer will be competing with Box.net (or google).

Update#2: John has informed me that there may be around the double-bandwidth scenario. This may be possible in situations when the user needs to get straight to their file, however we do a lot of localized processing of the data before the user or the storage sees it.

Update: Michael Arrington and Rob Hof have their comments on this release.

By the way: Pending a company-wide decision, I think that “Sync without the think” will be the winner of our sync slogan contest.

Aaron Levie

By ,

co-founder and CEO

See all of Aaron's articles.

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  • http://www.webpronews.com David Utter

    It looks like Amazon is trying to address the bandwidth issue by including an interface to BitTorrent’s protocol. Is that a feature Box.net will implement? Will competitors like Google have to offer BT as an option too?

  • PK

    Yay! My slogan’s getting used :-)

  • Aaron

    One of our “sister” companies is Redswoosh, a p2p provider similar to BT- so it’s definitely a route we’ve considered. The main issue is that most of our users share their files with a limited number of people, so P2P is not always efficient in this scenario. Will google go that direction? It seems that with their investments in broadband, they might just end up owning the pipes. More on this in a future blog post ;)

  • http://www.andrewwooldridge.com Andrew Wooldridge

    You’re position statement kinda makes me sad. I was hoping to use box.net for storage for my browser extensions, syncing files like say with scrapbook (http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/) and even building a simple remote drive… Guess I’ll check out amazon.

  • John Cormie

    Check out our query string authentication mechanism. It’s designed to solve the exact “double paying for bandwidth” problem you mention. You should be able to sign a REST request with your application’s identity, then serve your customer a link or tag directly into S3.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/sdk/104-1775788-0244713?v=2006-03-01&s=AmazonS3

  • Faraz

    hey..
    so which entries are in the short-list for the company tagline competiton?

  • Aaron

    Andrew,

    I should have been a bit more specific about my post (I have now revised it to make it very clear what I mean). Box.net is not intended to be the equivalent of buying 100gb on a server somewhere. We are focused on consumers and consumer applications. That means we cannot benefit in any way out of someone using us as an invisible backend to store files from their site. That is what a web host (and now amazon) does. We look for opportunities where a user will rely on us for their photos, documents, and important files for remote access, backup, or sharing.

    Building a simple remote drive via our API is exactly the type of functionality we are looking for. It is something we can eventually promote in our “widgets/modules” section… Let me know if you have anymore questions.

  • JOJOFACE

    Interesting. I’m glad you didn’t pair up with Amazon, because like you said, Box.net and Amazon’s services are different.

  • http://webword.com John S. Rhodes

    Trying to wrap my arms around this but I’m having difficulty. I suggest that you try one more time for those of us who don’t quite get Box.net versus Amazon.

    Here’s my stab at it, which of course tells shows you what I think you are saying:

    Box.net = “hard drive on the web”; for humans; general access via browser but also through various web applications (still mostly by humans); web site and application independent

    Amazon = web hosting / storage web service; for web sites and applications (machines and developers but not end users); access via APIs and code, web site and application dependent

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  • http://www.andrewwooldridge.com/blog Andrew Wooldridge

    I think I’m finally getting it. I believe things will get clearer as folks build apps on this.

  • http://www.goowy.com Alex

    Aaron,

    Great post! keep it up the good work!

    Your friends goowy!

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  • http://www.selfstorage.com/ SelfStorage.com

    Makes sense to me from a user standpoint – Box.net is comparable to Dropbox and is an online hard drive. Amazon, on the other hand, offers web hosting, plain and simple. It’s interfaced with using FTP and is not built for simple UI interactions. In fact, Box.net could potentially use Amazon S3 to store your files, but you would use Box.net to access them. Is that correct?

    • Mark Saldana

      That’s correct, Tony. We would of course notify our users of any big changes we make to how we store files.

      Best,

      Mark

  • http://www.juicymaters.com Bob@JuicyMaters

    “Sync without the think” is close, but needs an ad/copywriters touch.

    How about “Sync without thync”

  • http://www.1001tricks.com/ Hafis

    what is the bandwidth offered for free users per month on box? ( is it 10gb/month??)