I seem to have got myself in a pickle with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). I signed up for S3 and JungleDisk, using the latter to upload thousands of files to the space that I paid for on a monthly basis.
Unfortunatly I found the rate of file transfer too slow and without a decent alpha differencing algorithm, updating my collection of files became too slow. JungleDisk then decided to start charging for their software and that tipped the balance. I decided to empty the account in order not to be charged for it any longer.
The problem arose after I'd emptied the account. JungleDisk showed no files, but Amazon reported several hundred megabytes of files. What's more, Amazon said the account was entirely my responsibility and offered no way to access or purge the files I had stored there.
Fortunately Webdrive saved the day, well, nearly! I established that I had more than 17,000 undeleted files online - cache files that JungleDisk hadn't cleaned up properly - and I started deleting them with Webdrive.
Unfortunately Webdrive only showed 1000 files at a time and deleting took ages. I eventually tired of reconnecting, deleting 1000 files and then disconnecting. Lather, rinse, repeat 18 times.
In the end I contacted Amazon and asked them to terminate the service. The thing I realised is that no organisation was really out of integrity with their commitments - JungleDisk had been free and Amazon hadn't put the files in my S3 account and wasn't obliged to provide a mechanism for managing those files - but similarly no one was willing to take responsibility for helping me resolve the problem.
I had a frustrating support interaction with Amazon who simply said "take it up with JungleDisk" and washed their hands of it. I decided to simply cancel my entire Amazon Developer account and it was only in my second interaction with them that I established it was possible to just turn off the S3 bit, leaving EC2.
It made me realise that it's becoming easier and easier to fall through the gaps in this new digital world. The only way to remain profitable whilst maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is to constantly react to your customers' software experiences and improve the software. Stuff just goes wrong sometimes and even if no one's to blame, users need a solution.