Amazon.Com Exploring Web Service Avenues

One venture involves hosting an increasing number of Web sites for clients, says company founder Jeff Bezos.

SAN FRANCISCO — The trials that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos faced when building his Web empire — from coming up with the software to buying servers — still plague online entrepreneurs today, he said Monday.

"Between the idea and the product is some undifferentiated heavy lifting," Bezos said.

That’s why his company branched out in 2004 and created Amazon Web Services, a rapidly growing franchise that’s doing the heavy lifting for clients by hosting an increasing number of Web sites.

Bezos explained his budding service at the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo here, an event that brings together technological innovators to share ideas and discuss the future of the Internet.

Though the new service is a departure from Amazon’s work with tangible goods, it grew out of the company’s experiences in creating its own network.

"(We asked) what are the things we are good at, and if we can package them in the right way, can we

provide them as a service?" he said.

To demonstrate Amazon Web Services’ growth, Bezos said its storage component, S3, stored 800 million files of all kinds last July.

That number ballooned to 5 billion files today, he said.

However, simply storing large numbers of files isn’t enough for a successful Web hosting service, Bezos said. To compete, Amazon has found several ways to charge clients for their minute-to-minute needs.

A system called SQS monitors the number of data requests from individual Web sites and adjusts the number of computers handling the data on the fly.

"You can dynamically change the number of CPUs working at one time," Bezos said.

For example, should traffic at a normally obscure site skyrocket for a few days because of news links from popular sites, SQS can handle the increased hits without becoming overwhelmed, then scale back down when traffic ebbs and keep costs low for clients.

Bezos said the new service is not yet making a profit, though he considers it an investment for the future.

Amazon isn’t moving away from material goods, however. Bezos said another of Amazon’s new services for tech companies is Fulfillment by Amazon, which stores clients’ materials at the company’s warehouses for a fee per cubic foot.