Whenever I get the email from Amazon telling me that our monthly bill for web service usage is available, I take it as an excuse to spend a little while looking at our usage stats and how our storage needs have grown.

When I started working at 37signals in October of 2006, we were using less than 1.5TB of disk space for customer data for all of our applications and were starting to get to the point where redundancy and backups were becoming a headache. Shortly after I started, we decided to give S3 a trial run with Campfire and we became believers pretty quickly.

The fact that S3 is priced so reasonably (our last bill was $2,004.12) and the fact that it’s generally hassle free has enabled us to drastically increase the storage limits for all of our applications. Not having to worry about managing the file servers and backups is a pretty nice bonus as well.

Here are some stats from last month, and from October 2007 to compare how things have changed over the past 6 months.