I received a newsletter from amazon some hours ago with some news about S3:

[..]
We are pleased to announce beta support for Amazon S3 bucket policies, which gives customers the ability to create conditional rules for managing access to their buckets and objects. Amazon S3 customers now have the following options for restricting access to their resources:

• Authenticated requests: Allow or deny access based on AWS account
• Query string authentication with expiring URLs: Allow temporary access to resources
• Request-based restrictions: Allow or deny access based on request attributes, such as HTTP referrer and IP address

With bucket policies, customers can also now define security rules that apply to more than one object, including all objects or a subset of objects within a bucket. This makes updating and managing permissions easier.
[..]

This makes S3 much more fun! You can create temporary access to resources based on a query string like session id’s.

You can restrict content to be used only within your website without external linking (HTTP referrer).

And simple group editing using security rules, just change the rules for a folder with one command instead of executing it for every file!

I like that!

More control over your own data and easier editing!

I am working with Google Apps for emails, Apple for selling iPhone Apps and Amazon for some hosting.

All three companies are major players when it comes to internet services.

All three offer some very unique services at a very good price.

In the previous 6 months I had several support issues with all of them and was left wondering, how much support does one really need?

My answer is: None, well, a little bit, but it should be organized.

Let my explain why I came to this conclusion:

These three companies do their homework and have the ambitions to provide very solid premium services. Normally there should not be a need for support because services are running and everything is explained in a help section. That does apply to 99% of their customers for 99.99% of the time.

If you have a support request it will normally be something you can get help yourself by reading the help sections or it is simply a not (yet) supported feature. Use it as it is or leave it.

So why the need for support, if everything is working as expected and you can’t change the services themself? Right, no need for it!

This is exactly how we have run Google Apps the first year without the need for support, we run servers and services on Amazons WebServices the first year without the need for support (except some billing related request in the beginning) and sold iPhone Apps for the last two years without the need for support (except one support request on contract beginning).

But nothing is perfect and sometimes problems emerge that can’t be foreseen. In these cases a well organized support structure is needed. You will need to a clear statement when the problem occurs, a status about the progress and a final statement about it being solved/closed.

From the support requests I had in the last months, I can see only one company offering that kind of basic support structure: Amazon