Accessing S3 from Linode is prohibitively expensive. The base storage fee is the cheap part. It costs three times as much to transfer one gigabyte of data off of S3 ($0.09) than it does to actually store the gigabyte of data there for a month ($0.03). Linode doesn't have to come anywhere near S3's storage prices in order to be competitive for Linode compute customers, as long as data transfer between Linode VMs and Linode storage is free (as it is between EC2 and S3). I'd gladly pay $0.10/GB/month for a Linode object hosting service.