You have no contract committing you to any fixed charges, we only charge per consumed resources.

No, the service is only charged for the consumption of storage on a daily base.

We offer geo-replicated buckets (Create bucket) to increase availability, so if you need other forms of data protection you need to manage that through other solutions.

We offer a DataMover which is a rack mounted server which can store ~350TB of data. This can used to migrate large amounts of data from your datacenter in to the S3 service potentially in shorter time and less impact on your network.

Creating a replicated bucket protects your data against region failure and makes it accessible during outage. So replicated buckets is a way to reach higher availability, should you have those requirements.

Example:

You have created a replicated bucket and se-central-1 experiences network outage.
After re-pointing your application or tool to se-north-1, you can continue to access your data.
Once se-central-1 is back in operational state, replication engine will make sure any changes to your data is reflected to se-central-1, in this example.

Data is stored with 256-bit AES encryption when it resides on disk.